One of the sessions I attended yesterday at Oracle OpenWorld had the unexciting title of, "Building Applications with Oracle Secure Enterprise Search." What it really was about was why A.T. Kearney tossed out PC DOCS and installed Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) to track its intellectual property generated by consulting engagements.
Basically, the A.T. Kearney consultants revolted against all the work they had to do to submit documents to the PC DOCS system. Driven by billable hours, they said, "I'm not spending 15 minutes filling out metadata fields." So, compliance was minimal and the company couldn't reuse material it had already created.
After looking at Documentum, IBM Omnifind, Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle SES, and Verity, A.T. Kearney chose Oracle SES. Consultants submit their documents to a team area, the system crawls them, and the company now knows what it knows. In the past, compliance hovered in the 10% area; now it's around 80%.
The interesting thing to me about this talk was that it's almost a complete replay of a talk I heard at FAST Search's conference in February -- although in that case the company was Ernst & Young and they selected FAST's product. Even though the E&Y analysts knew it was important to keep their internal resumes up-to-date so they could be found for internal projects, they didn't. But you can be sure they kept them updated when submitting proposals to prospects. So the FAST system finds those resumes sent to customers and puts them into the internal system.
The takeaway is we may have a lot of great technology, but unless it fits in with the way people work, it won't get used.
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