Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

CASE STUDY engineering A BETTER SEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE BY ILANA PERRY REYNOLDS ORGANIZATION: Chicago Bridge and Iron Company, www.cbi.com VENDOR OR SOLUTION PROVIDER OF CHOICE: IBM, www.ibm.com Experience Matters Chicago Bridge & Iron Company (CB&I), a global engineering, procurement, and construction company, specializes in large-scale turnkey projects for firms that produce, process, store, and distribute natural resources. The company serves a number of industries including oil and gas, petrochemical and chemical, power, water and wastewater, and metals and mining. Given the magnitude and importance of these complex, multimillion dollar infrastructure projects, CB&I customers often rank experience high among their selection criteria. “Much of what makes us successful is the knowledge gained from past engagements and the expertise of our employees, acquired from years in their industries,” explains John Shaull, a senior technical analyst for CB&I. Yet, with approximately 60 locations and 11,000 employees worldwide, one of CB&I’s biggest challenges was sharing that knowledge across the company. Because information was stored in more than 50 project-specific databases along with myriad other sources—customer account and contact applications, document distribution and project control systems, and even local file servers in each office—CB&I employees often didn’t know where to begin a search for project-related information. Project staff had to call or email geographic managers, who would then network with their peers to help find the pertinent information. It was a tedious process that often took days. With customer deadlines looming, many times employees couldn’t wait and would have to develop supporting materials from scratch. Additionally, with employees reusing procedural forms stored in their email accounts, executives worried that corporate policies and processes might be inconsistently applied. It was an issue that could affect not only a project team’s efficiency, but also its safety. “The inability of employees to share information was a major challenge,” says Shaull. “We lost productivity. We could not leverage gains in efficiencies and best practices garnered from previous engagements. And we couldn’t effectively show potential clients the full depth of our experience.” Building a Knowledge-Based Organization In response, CB&I executives launched an information initiative that would help the company evolve to a knowledgebased organization. With this focus, executives hoped to increase collaboration among CB&I employees worldwide in order to drive greater innovation and continual process improvements. Essential to achieving these goals was an enterprise search capability that would enable employees to find relevant information from any internal source by simply entering a keyword or phrase.This meant being able to do the following: • Search a broad range of information sources, including both structured and unstructured data, and enable documents to be viewed through the company’s customized web-based portal. • Provide highly relevant and refined search results that enable employees to find exactly what they need without having to know where data is located. • Limit access to approved documents only so that employees can’t inadvertently use out-of-date or draft materials. • Deliver subsecond response times to eliminate delays in obtaining information. WWW.ENTERPRISESEARCHCENTER.COM 63 http://www.cbi.com http://www.ibm.com http://WWW.ENTERPRISESEARCHCENTER.COM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008

Enterprise Search Sourcebook 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Publisher’s Note Findings and Figures Why Enterprise Search Will Never Be Google-y Searching for Search Usability Your Users Are Talking to You What’s Your Search Story? Search Is Dead—Now What? Delivering on the Promise of Enterprise Search Taming Multiple Search Engines in Your Organization Enterprise Search: Trends for 2008 Enterprise Search Seen From the Inside Open Source Search: Elixir or Poison? Avoiding the Big Mistakes in Search Semantic Search Takes Root in the Enterprise E-Discovery Essentials: The Rules You Need to Know SharePoint Search: An Enterprise Contender? Integrating Security Into Your Enterprise Search Infrastructure Engineering a Better Search Infrastructure Letting End Users Ask the Questions, Stat! The Power of Knowledge Legal Research Using Enterprise Search: A Developer’s View From Treading Water to Full Steam Ahead Pulling Out All the Stops With Midas A Natural Search Solution An Incremental Approach to Improving Enterprise Search The Enterprise Search Sourcebook Showcase Directory Index to Advertisers and Companies Mentioned

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