What is Enterprise Search?

In this day and age, there are very few questions without answers. They may not always be right answers but even the most well thought out Google query can lead you down a rabbit hole of theories, thoughts, and best guesses that help you craft answers to even the hardest questions like, “What is the meaning of life?”. The power of modern search engines has made the spread of information more equitable and trained us that any question can be answered via search.

But in reality, not all information is created equal, especially in the business world where proprietary knowledge and the free-flow of team- and company-specific information is essential. You can’t just Google, “How many of our orders shipped late last quarter?”

Or can you?

For these business-specific needs, there’s enterprise search. From giving customer support agents quick access to the info they need to answer customer questions to achieving content unification within your organization for team-wide access to common information, enterprise search enables companies to be as knowledgeable as possible. The Attivio Platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to provide a secure enterprise search solution.

What Is Enterprise Search?

Enterprise search indexes and makes content from any source of information (like databases and intranets) searchable to specific people within the company – or outside, in the case of customer support. Unlike web search which only scrapes publicly-available information on the web, enterprise search dives headlong into internal, privately-held files that only defined audience can access.

Enterprise search platforms are excellent at integrating structured content (a CRM platform like Salesforce) and unstructured data (like emails) and making it searchable by the end user. With the additional advantage of applying access controls to enforce a security policy on their users, allowing an entire team to access crucial data without data leakage. These systems facilitate the essential free-flow of company information while also maintaining security.

Attivio takes enterprise search a step further. Utilizing state-of-the-art AI and machine learning, Attivio ensures that both internal and external users of your site have seamless, immediate, and relevant answers for their search queries.

Content Unification

In most organizations, proprietary knowledge and data is scattered across people and systems. Obviously, this creates some inconvenience when a team member that’s not privy to that data needs to gain access to this information. Attivio’s platform allows for content to be unified. This brings information across organizational silos together, automatically discovering the meaning in your data and documents, so you don’t have to enforce a manual search hierarchy.

As you acquire new sources of data and documents, you can easily onboard it into your existing enterprise search system. Using machine learning, the most relevant answers are presented to each individual user, and the system learns over time, making sure the latest information is what’s being used.

Cognitive Search

Employees have grown accustomed to using intuitive tools like Google, Alexa, and Siri in their personal lives to immediately answer their questions. In the workplace, they expect the same ease of use with their intranet search. Attivio’s cognitive search achieves that ease of use. By connecting people who need knowledge on a particular topic and people who own the expertise, both in-house and remote employees are able to collaborate digitally in a thriving community. Attivio leverages machine learning and text analytics techniques to infer skills and expertise to allow everyone in the same community to search and discover solutions relevant to them quickly. If for any reason they have trouble, they’re tied in directly to the community to connect to a person with more information. By putting search at the core of your business, users get faster search, highly relevant results, and are tied into a digital community that improves employee collaboration and engagement.

Personalized Site Search

Attivio goes beyond internal solutions to interface directly with your site’s visitors and consumers. By making information on your site easier to find, you can dramatically improve visitor engagement. That’s a pretty basic idea but making it a reality is harder than you might think.

Attivio leverages text analytics, natural language processing, and machine learning capabilities to understand and predict what information a visitor wants, thereby offering up recommendations before the visitor even makes a request.

This personalization helps to optimize the digital experience. Combining behavioral and demographic data points with intelligence about the information on the site allows Attivio (and the site administration) to create an informed profile of each visitor, where they are in their browsing, and what content they’d find most value in. When you know your users and your site, you can develop better insights and deliver better, more personalized content to users faster.

Summary

The Attivio Platform achieves these goals through state-of-the-art, secure AI and machine learning techniques that go well beyond the basic call of duty. Attivio offers seamless legacy replacement of existing enterprise search infrastructure like Google Search Appliance, Microsoft FAST, HPE IDOL, and IBM Watson, or can be easily installed as a new platform in the cloud, on premise, or with a hybrid infrastructure depending on your needs and security requirements.