Bridging Your SharePoint Silos
The almost viral deployment of SharePoint Servers across all industries and government agencies is a very strong validation of the value of the software and the ease of its deployment. However, this can be both a blessing, and a curse. These rapid and grass roots deployments have further accentuated the physical and virtual walls surrounding organizations within the enterprise itself. SharePoint – based applications, repositories and users are well serviced by their local installations but have created yet another level of silos that are not easily accessible from the rest of the enterprise. We call this portal 'sprawl', similar to urban sprawl that occurs when planning and zoning is lacking in a community. The Discover suite of products is specifically intended to facilitate information discovery, sharing, and worker collaboration while still allowing and promoting the proliferation of SharePoint to meet individual organization's needs.
Combating Brain Drain
Many organizations are adversely affected by the retirement or resignation of key employees, and the fact that much of their gained experience and knowledge walks out the door with them when they leave. DiscoverPoint is able to capture and retain a very good understanding of each employee's areas of expertise/focus, and to leverage that on behalf of your other employees into the future. Every document the departing employee authored, every research effort they worked on, is known by the DiscoverPoint system and is available for supporting your organization, without any particular effort or level of cooperation required from the former employee.
Improving Employee (Knowledge Worker) Productivity
Your subject matter experts, whether they are conducting R&D efforts, tackling medical maladies, or any other form of research/investigations, most likely spend a significant portion of their day looking for key information resources to support their analysis efforts. In fact, many such employees have to use multiple tools, on a daily basis, to search for information across many disparate information sources. This is time consuming, and costly. Discover Technologies' suite of products streamline the search and delivery process so that your experts spend much more of their time applying their expertise and much less time preparing to do so. It does this by automatically understanding the user's areas of interest and 'pushing' highly relevant information to them, without them having to ask for it.
Information Overload
Sure, you may have some amount of information that is not key to your mission, however identifying and removing such information is a costly effort and most likely would not significantly reduce the total data load. The amount of unstructured electronic information available is increasing at a tremendous rate, every year. Some organization's data repositories double or triple each year. Your real problem is that, like most organizations, you do not have adequate tools to easily navigate through to access the key information in a timely and cost effective manner. DiscoverPoint and our eXtensible Search Framework (XSF) will help reduce the effect of 'too much data' and do so with minimal impact on your daily operations.
Effective Knowledge Worker Collaboration
The proliferation of networking tools, such as OCS and various intranet social networking products provides some beneficial capabilities to help facilitate more effective collaboration among personnel in a large and distributed environment. However, the really difficult problem to solve is not how to communicate, but rather with whom to communicate. How can an organization possibly track the expertise/interests of each and every employee without investing huge amounts of time and resources into building and maintaining a skills database, MySite pages, or other manually supported data stores? DiscoverPoint actually "Discovers" the interests/needs of all of your knowledge workers, then delivers relevant documents and introduces them to colleagues and experts who can help them do their assignments better and faster, regardless of what department or location they work in.
Overcome User Adoption Pitfalls
Even the most sophisticated, well funded and thought-out Knowledge Sharing systems are vulnerable to the same basic issue; their level of success is directly proportionate to the participation level of knowledge workers throughout the enterprise. Until now, these types of systems have relied on linking participation and user adoption to job performance (the 'stick' approach) or trying to create incentive programs to motivate employees (the 'carrot' approach). Simply put, If a knowledge management/ sharing system makes life more cumbersome for employees, it will fail. DiscoverPoint requires no user overt adoption, whatsoever. All of the knowledge sharing and collaboration occurs automatically, as a result of the knowledge workers performing their everyday jobs. This non-intrusive approach ensures that the system will be embraced by the workforce and, as such, protects the investment in implementing the solution.
Industry Specific Applications of Discover Technologies Solutions
Discover's technologies are not limited to use within any particular industry segment, but rather are designed to improve productivity and reduce costs within any large organization that depends heavily on the performance of their knowledge workers. For such organizations, subject matter experts comprise a very substantial portion of their costs and have a major impact on the entity's overall success. Whether the organization's goals are to increase profit, achieve a competitive advantage, improve the quality of service being provided to constituents/customers, or other business objectives, the ability of your knowledge workers to do their jobs better and faster, at a lower cost, is key. Below, please find a sampling of industries and applications where Discover's solutions will bear abundant fruit:
- Medical Research
- Anti-terrorism
- Criminal Investigations
- Higher Education Studies/Research
- Manufacturing - Competitive Analysis
- Product Design
- Pharmacueticals
- Litigation/eDiscovery
- Insurance/Financial Analysis
- Advertising and Public Relations
- Information Technology
- Energy & Environmental Services
- Government – Civilian, Defense, Intelligence
- Human Resources and Recruiting
- Transportation
- Communications
- Security
- Retail
- Consumer Products
- Systems Integrators
