Technical Innovation Powering Business
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National Instruments is a leader in computer-based measurement and automation with over 4300 employees worldwide. To power business innovations, NI implemented three technical innovations to their website over a period of several months. The innovations included faceted/guided navigation to organize large amounts of technical content and product information, dynamic content reuse and linking to integrate related materials, and a knowledge management system to provide a 360 degree view of customer accounts across 25 disparate systems. These innovations improved key metrics like visits, orders, and search referrals by implementing an enterprise search platform that utilizes consistent categorization, metadata enrichment, and a content repository.
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Technical Innovation Powering Business
- 1. Technical Innovation Powering Business InnovationsInfuse your Enterprise Content with Intelligence! Patriek SijinKarayil Search Program Director Web Platforms Team, National Instruments April 11, 2008
- 3. 4300+ employees WW
- 4. Over 2000 Products
- 5. Direct Operations in 40 countries
- 7. What does that mean for the Company? Superior ni.com website – Business model High level of automation Scalability of Business Process, IT infrastructure Front End – Back end integration
- 8. What is a Business Innovation? Tactical rather than abstract concept Project/Process Initiative filling a gap ‘Recombinant & Behavioral Innovation’ Incremental, Componentized
- 9. Technical Innovation Powering Business Information resides where it is not easily found. Innovation 1 – Faceted/Guided Navigation – 4 months Innovation 2 – Dynamic Content Reuse – 1 month Innovation 3 – Knowledge Management – 3 months Information Discovery – Self Service of User Needs.
- 10. Innovation 1 – Faceted/Guided Navigation Marketing, Pricing information Product Spec Database Specification
- 13. Ski Location
- 14. Vacation Spot
- 15. Fine Dining
- 16. Outlet Shopping
- 17. Render 100,000+ content through platform
- 19. Innovation 3 – Sales Knowledge Management Need a 360 degree view of my Accounts What is happening in my area? Information exists in 25+ disparate silos. Over 4.3 millions pieces of content. Secure web based Search app with sub second response time!
- 20. LDAP-based Security Faceted navigation Context-sensitive facets Date-based facets Hierarchical facets Numerical facets
- 24. Search is an Enterprise Sharing Environment
- 25. Critical Information Service LayerContent
- 27. Apps with dynamic interfaces FAST Search Platform Content API Query API Search Index
- 28. NIME (NI Metadata Enrichment) Proprietary Software built in house, nonexistent Serendipity? Adding Intelligence to content that need not be maintained. Internal Awareness, Internal Responsiveness.
- 29. How – Team Composition, Culture Search Management Practice. Matrixed Organization Clear ownership in all tiers ; Business Analysts, Web Marketing Engineers, IT Developers. Non Hierarchical Controlled Culture – Budgeting not a road block
- 30. Final Takeaways Information Driven Enterprise – Innovative Information Inter-relationships can be abstracted through Search. Crawling Information Extraction Refinement
- 31. New Value Propositions in the works.. Localized Results Dynamic Product Content Aggregator Metadata refinement and content linking Revolutionize Customer Mgmt. Reducing TCO Manuals Product Overview Software Driver Datasheet Technical Support Community Content
- 32. Q&A
Editor's Notes
- Ladies & Gentlemen; My name is Patriek SijinKarayil, Navigation & Search Program Director for National Instruments. In the sprit of this Innovations Intelligence conference I want to share with you how a technical Innovation has powered numerous Business innovations and how we have added a tremendous value to the company.
- First lets take a look at National Instruments. We are a leader in computer based measurement and automation. Over 4300 + employees. The sliver lining here is our diverse operation. We have over 2000 products, selling in over 90 countries to over 25+ industries.
- Hence our customer needs differ quite extensively. From the automotive to Oil&Gas to Medicalwe have to be in a position to serve up information and products to make them successful.
- So what does that mean for the company? We have a highly diverse product offering and multiplex that with a highly diverse customer base gives rise to a lot long tail demand. This requires us to have a highly automated localized website ni.com localized in 9 prominent languages. Our business process and IT infrastructure needs to be scalable to meet this business need. Need a well integrated information system that is conducive to organizational sharing of information. So we have to be innovative in our business process to engage this long tail demand.
- Let me spend a few mins defining what is business innovation and how it is managed. Firstly at NI innovation is very tactical function rather than an abstract concept. More times with ever it is an initiative at a project or process level aimed at filing a gap. I was in Tom’s Innovation Master class yesterday and I have borrowed his terms here. On the business side our innovations can be classified as ecombinant and Behavioural innovation. Recombinant meaning recombining existing and available components in a new package. An example is strategic content reuse. Behavioral Innovation – creates new behaviors and is breathrough in nature. But regardless as to the magnitude of impact, we also take a passive ‘Spoon full at a time’ approach. The innovation is applied to one component at a time, monitored closely and then slowly adopted.
- In this presentation we will take a look at the how a Search Driven innovation powered the business through information mining. Information resides 9 our of 10 times in places where it is not easily found.As a user applications are only successful to the extend that I’m satisfied with the experience of effectively and easily self servicing my information needs. These business innovations are aimed at providing just that, application that can renender better information discovery to self service the user’s needs that enhances their business decision making ability and reducing workflow frictions.So we will look at three different business innovations leveraging our technical innovation that has added tremendous value to the organization.
- Faceted/Guided Navigation by definition is “Navigate or Search the way you think”. Unlike a simple hierarchical scheme, faceted classification gives the users the ability to find items based on more than one dimension. It is progressive filtering scheme traverserved by the user based on his/her needs. For example a restaurant guide, traditional navigation system – forces users to follow a path to choose a restaurant first by location, then price, then ratings, then ambience etc. In a faceted navigation system the user is in command and can choose to first choose restaurants by price and then rating and finally by location.Over 77% of website have some kind of faceted navigation. Since we have over 1000+ hw products, we innovated a Specification driven navigation. So we took the product specifications and synthesed with the Product Marketing information. By doing so we have just added intelligence to this marketing content.
- So users now can slice and dice and find products based on the specifications that they care about to meet the needs of their applications. We are now able to provide user a compare products functionality which previous existing my eye balling the printed catalog.
- We did applied the same faceted navigation concept to all our technical content site sections. We have allowed the assignment of multiple classifications to an object enabling the content to be ordered in multiple ways rather than a predetermined order.
- We talked about using specifications to navigate. Here what we have done is dynamically pull and reuse content and also link related content. These are ecommerce product pages. They pages are a point of sale for us and since we have such a diverse customer base, we increased the value proposition of these pages by brining supportive content to help empower the customer to make the right purchasing decision and be comfortable with it.
- With the 25,000 companies in 90 countries the amount of sales information in the enterprise is immense. There was a need for our Sales Force to have a 360 view of all activity happening in their respective territories. So based on customer activity they can be proactive in identifying and nurturing large orders, following up with key customers etc. This information exists but in 25+ disparate silos – the classic enterprise situation. Providing information from different sources to different users in a secure way is a daunting task by nature.
- But due to our Technical Innovation we built the knowledge management application serving up 4.3 million pieces of content. As you can see we have Faceted Navigation so that this information can now be sliced and diced. The context sensitive facets can progressively filter this information providing the Sales force actionable information that at one time was not accessible.The application also gives the sales force a 360 view of their account providing contact info, orders, service requests, quotes, past records, etc. Information Sharing is powerful but at the same time there are risks if this information shared in incomplete. But we were able to provide this holistic view, essentially essembling all pieces of the puzzle to provide a bigger picture.
- So how did we make all of this happen. That is where the NIDNA/Search Team comes in. Our goal is to organize and Integrate NI’s information and universally deliver it.
- The scope there is NI’s information which is revolutionary. The complexity of our portfolio continues to grow. Andthe need to integrate applications grows as well. What’s missing is a common enterprise information model. The National Instruments approach is for consistent content categorization is through single sourced taxonomy(controller vocabularies). But What do I really mean by Entreprise Taxonomy. An Analogy is this Nutrition Facts label standardized by the FDA. So regardless of any food product you pick up it has a standard metadata, a standard taxonomy used for classification. Much like the FDA, we have administered this taxonomy across not just web content but all enterprise repositories. Now we have a common language that spans both technological and functional area.Given this revolutionary high level of adoption, we can leaverage Enterprise Search to Integrate content from across tiers to add business value throughout the company.
- We changed the paradigm as to how we view Enterprise Search. Search was no more a white box on sitting on top of raw content. It is now a platform!In the enterprise with numerous closed systems, Search becomes with open system that can integrate this diverse information residing in these closed systems. Search is capable of not just indexing, it can refine, reuse and integrate this wealth of information. It is now the enterprise information sharing environment that applications tap into as the critical information service layer. In fact the Search Maturity of an enterprise, is becoming the competitive differentiator! In fact all the innovations we saw are all search driven solutions – Because Search is the interlink in our enterprise information ecosystem.A Platform is: Wikipedia defines a platform as: ” In computing, a platform describes some sort of hardware architecture or software framework (including application frameworks), that allows software to run.” In our case we define a Platform as a framework that enables applications to build out functionality in a reliable and consistent manner by focusing on their core functional competency and using shared components such as Front End framework, search integration, etc.
- So after investing in an enterprise taxonomy and recognizing Enterprise Search as a platform.. Lets finally connect the dots. I will now unviel our Technical Innovation which was nominated at the IT solution of the Year, finality of the Association of IT Professionals.Normally we have content repositories and they are pushed into the Search Engine. But we developed a configurablemetadata enrichment tool that provides integration with multiple repositories pulling related data from external data sources. This collection and synthesis of related data infuse intelligence into it. This combination of rich profiling and matching will result in applications with highly dynamic interfaces connecting users with content with greater precision an ease as we saw with our faceted navigation and knowledge management application.
- This is a proprietary software built in house, non existent with the Search vendors and in the industry. This envolved due to serendipity. We have the high adoption of our taxonomy and by shifting our perception of Enterprise search, we stumbled upon this value proposition of infusing intelligence that need not be maintained. So content creators can focus on their core competencies. As you saw, we were able to execute on our business innovations in a matter of months. This technical innovation being so foundational in nature increase our internal awareness (so we break a solution employed for an innovate effort and rebuilt it to form another) and thus increase our internal responsiveness to demand.
- Although I said it was serendipity that lead to this innovation. There is an underlying business model that deserves credit for this serendipity. Our Search management practice is unique. It is managed through a process of continuous improvement. Unlike business applications that are once implemented and can last a couple of years until a change in the underlying technology. Search is not static . Information constantly flow into the index. Metadata overlay can change and Search is not linear. So Seach requires a constant degree of innovation.Secondly our organization is very matrixed. We have individuals from different functional roles such as business analysts (tactical), business engineers (strategy) and IT developers come together to form a team and they all have a clear functional ownership in their tiers. Therefore innovation can sprout from both the business and IT side and in combination.Since we don’t have an hierarchical culture at NI, budgetting is not a road block. If we can show the value propossition of our innovation then it will be accepted.
- So before I wrap up – Lets review some quick takeaways.Be an information Driven Enterprise – This by itself is innovative and will nurture and increase the effectiveness of new discoveries.Search can abstract out the information inter-relationships. Crawling and indexing content has been a hallmark for Search. Extracting information from systems in the next step. But refinement of collected information via virtue of infusing intelligence and extracting entities is the true value add.
- Here is some food for thought. This is one of our new value propositions in the works. This is a product support page where we dynamically aggregate all kinds of content for a product. So customers will have a one stop shop for all their needs about that product. Beyond the obvious, we are revolutionizing customer interaction management by providing new leverage on valuable enterprise information. We can do this because Search is not a point solution, it is an enterprise Shared service infrastructure so any innovation is this realm as you can seen is reusable reducing our total cost of ownership and our time to market.