Summary
This multinational customer is made up of more than 100,000 people across 140 different nationalities and services more than 120 countries.
They are the world’s leading provider of technology for reservoir characterization, drilling, production, and processing to a global energy industry. The organization believes that energy makes society progress, so they focus on finding ways to help their customers fuel agriculture, industry, medicine, science, space, technology, and transportation. Their success is based on a combination of engineering disciplines, along with computer science, geophysics, and metallurgy. Then there are astounding efforts to keep older wells pumping despite time’s inevitable drain on production. Their distributed workforce business relies on availability of information across the globe from a variety of sources, and for long periods of time.
Struggling with the lack of a unified search experience, this leader in oilfield services worked with BA Insight to deploy a robust search experience and adopt Office 365 and SharePoint.
Challenge
Information availability was the critical issue for this customer. Historically, they had used the Google Search Appliance with some success, but with Google retiring that product and the company moving to Microsoft Office 365, the decision was made to go away from basic site search and implement a more robust and functional internal search using Office 365 as the platform.
Their users also lacked a single pane of glass search for SharePoint content, Yammer content, and OneDrive content, as well as a document preview capability that worked for all content independent of where it resides.
Strategy
BA Insight worked with this organization to define the vision around a unified search experience, with OneDrive and Yammer content indexed into a single SharePoint Online index.
The solution was a combination of the following capabilities:
- Connectors to return Yammer, OneDrive, and structured database content results within the same results as other content, rather than as separate searches.
- Ability to search and find documents and the most relevant pages within those documents in a single search for all content (rather than only SharePoint content) so that users have a consistent experience. The users can also get instant document previews and even assemble new documents by using BA Insight’s workspace feature.
Results
This customer was able to provide users with a single place to go to search for critical information, increasing adoption of Office 365 and SharePoint. They can even easily search for information that is stored in their new cloud environment. Users are now able to find information much more quickly, reducing duplication of efforts, and freeing them up to do other things to positively contribute to the organization.
The customer is continuing the project by implementing search solutions at both the business unit and department levels, making further capabilities available (i.e., chat bots, best bets, etc.) to the employee search experience, moving away from a SharePoint interface to an internet-like user interface and incorporating additional structured data into their search environment.
The key components to this next phase of activity are the following:
- Implementation of BA Insight’s SmartHub to provide an AI-driven platform that takes advantage of natural language query, bots, autocomplete, recommendations, and personalization to move their internal search to the next level, modernizing it to be more internet-like.
- Deploying AutoClassifer to automate the tagging process with an integrated AI-driven and rules-based approach that provides taxonomy management and entity recognition/ extraction with machine learning and cognitive services from Microsoft and Google to power metadata creation, document summaries, image OCR, audio transcripts, and more.
