[Case Study: Search and Collaboration]

Search and Collaboration for Global Fortune 100 Highly Regulated Company

The challenge: A drain of millions of dollars a year in unnecessary fines, lost time due to inefficient collaboration, and ineffective enterprise information search capabilities.

This company of more than 60,000 computer users needed a comprehensive solution to improve their information management infrastructure, technology, and practices. Access Sciences  contributed in a variety of ways:

• Designing and building a taxonomy and metadata model as the foundation to search. This enterprise taxonomy is built to meet the need for employees to create, file, and retrieve their information in a way that is familiar to them and efficient for their use against the need for regulatory compliance. Finding the right balance is one of today's biggest information management challenges, as each workgroup has a unique way of doing business, communicating with each other, and sharing information.
• Designing information life cycle, discovery, and other critical process flows. Building these process flows is often overlooked by companies until they are in the midst of configuring technology, leaving them in the position of accepting whatever process flows and life cycles the software package happens to suggest. This company knew to avoid that risk, and engaged Access Sciences to facilitate this work.  
• Designing and configuring interfaces within and across technology platforms to enable search and collaboration. At this time, there is no single package that can manage all aspects of a company's information repositories for structured data and unstructured content. Until such a package is built, companies will require system interfaces, repository synchronization, and other means for keeping information across platforms in sync. Access Sciences has the technical and functional knowledge to optimize how interfaces are designed and built so that system resource requirements are minimized, user interfaces are easy to use, and the right information is updated at the right time,   
• Serving as strategic adviser to global information management leadership group. This company has one of the more mature, deeply skilled, and globally capable information management teams in their industry. Their vision is powerful and well communicated. Even so, visionary leaders need advisers who can help them assess progress, manage risk, communicate effectively, and achieve strategic goals. This company knows that, and turned to Access Sciences to find the person best suited to assist them in this capacity.
• Providing guidance on search and collaboration requirements and auto-classification technology. Technology around search, collaboration, and auto-classification is changing faster than designs can be built. By investing in Access Sciences expertise, this company benefited from knowing the latest developments about the most robust packages.  With this knowledge available, and with an ongoing advising relationship in place, this company was able to make well-informed decisions based on what search, classification and collaboration technology best suited their needs.

The outcome: Access Sciences delivered tangible results quickly after joining the team, facilitating timely delivery against the business case and progress toward a feasible long term information management and technology solution.