Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Consulting Firm Works Smarter with Integrated Search to Find Data, Expertise
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Professional services
Customer Profile
Based in Washington, DC, Gallup has studied human behavior for more than 70 years, advising customers and reporting its findings around the world. It employs 2,000 professionals in 40 global offices.
Business Situation
Globally dispersed Gallup employees did not have a reliable search engine to find information stored in an outdated intranet. And there was no search tool to help locate experts for virtual teams.
Solution
Gallup chose Enterprise Search from Microsoft, a component of Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Employees can use Enterprise Search to find information and expertise anywhere in Gallup.
Benefits
n Unlock information assets
n Provides better customer service
n Improves productivity
n Reduces learning curve for new employees
n Improves access to Gallup experts / “At Gallup, people search is our most popular tool. Easily finding and accessing our scientists, some of whom are Nobel Prize winners, is a huge tactical benefit for our client-facing teams.”
Michael Roselius, System Administrator, Application Administration, Gallup
Based in Washington, DC, Gallup provides management consulting, human resources, and statistical research services for customers worldwide. Gallup wanted to provide employees with enterprise search functionality to unlock the value of its corporate information and subject matter expertise. The company chose the integrated Enterprise Search functionality built into Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and gained search capabilities for people, expertise, and structured and unstructured data within an extensible global information management solution. With searchable My Sites that come with Office SharePoint Server 2007, everyone can take advantage of social networking technologies to find experts, work more productively, and boost customer service.
Situation
George Gallup founded Gallup in 1958 by combining his polling operations into one company. Based in Washington DC, Gallup has subsidiary operations in 20 countries. Its reputation for delivering relevant, timely, and visionary research is the cornerstone of the organization. Gallup researchers and consultants include many of the world's leading scientists in management, economics, psychology, and sociology, and its consultants assist leaders in identifying and monitoring behavioral economic indicators. Gallup helps organizations boost growth by increasing customer engagement and maximizing employee productivity through measurement tools, coursework, and strategic advisory services. Gallup has four divisions: Gallup Poll, which regularly conducts public opinion polls in the United States and more than 140 other countries; Gallup Consulting; Gallup University; and Gallup Press.
“What makes Gallup different is that our consulting engagements are all empirically-based,” says Michael Roselius, System Administrator, Application Administration at Gallup. “If we make a suggestion about effecting a management change, it is because we have conducted research and analyzed results on that research to support our advice.”
Gallup has two key resources: information and people. The proprietary data and empirical knowledge stored within Gallup is the basic currency with which the company does business; however, it is produced and traded by highly-skilled people. The cumulative expertise of Gallup employees provides just as much value to customers as the research the company conducts. Information workers use empirical evidence or structured information stored in the company’s database systems or enterprise applications, but they also generate a vast amount of unstructured information. This consists of documents, e-mail messages, articles, correspondence and the like, which reside in desktop and portable computers and local file shares.
To reap the full value of its information and corporate expertise, Gallup needed to ensure that these assets were easily discoverable by employees. Unfortunately, the company did not have a centralized information repository, nor did it have a reliable, accurate search tool.
Looking for Experts
Gallup employees strive to create teams of people with the necessary expertise to quickly respond to business opportunities and deliver on their engagements. “To ensure that Gallup stays agile and responsive, we need to quickly pull our experts together from around the globe to collaborate and solve our clients’ business problems,” says Sheri Theer, Manager, Global Learning & Development, at Gallup. “This is one way we differentiate our service from that of our competitors.”
Gallup pioneered the concept of a “strengths-based” corporate culture, which encourages everyone to focus on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. All Gallup employees complete the Gallup-developed StrengthsFinder assessment test; the results, referred to within the organization as “your top five,” are an important way for the company to take advantage of employees’ talents. It is important for information workers to know one another’s strengths as they form teams, share knowledge, and answer questions.
“Everyone wanted a quick way to find experts based on their top five,” says Theer. “However, we could only search for contact information. So we sent e-mail messages around the company asking where we could find the right person for the job. It was not a productive use of our time.”
Finding Information
The company’s existing content management solution, which acted as a rudimentary intranet, did not perform well and was rarely used because of its poor search and document management capabilities. “People would try and find a document using the title, and the result would come up on page three of the results,” says Roselius.
So instead of storing documents or data within the existing knowledge management solution, Gallup employees archived information on their personal computers, or used file shares. This made information difficult to find, especially for colleagues working in virtual, global teams. “Global team members ended up calling one another to find information, which doesn’t work well across time zones,” says Charlie Colon, Executive Director, Gallup Technology. “Geographically disbursed file shares and global offices with information silos underscored the fact that not everyone had equal access to information. Nor could we ensure that the documents everyone was using were the most recent and relevant versions.”
These problems were especially troubling to newly hired employees who took even longer to find the information they needed to familiarize themselves with their new work environment. The company has hired more than 150 sales people in the last 18 months, and it wanted to streamline the transition of new hires into productive employees.
Gallup needed to improve access to information and expertise for its information workers so that they could boost productivity and provide better consulting services. The company planned on replacing its intranet with a complete communications, collaboration, and portal solution, so it began researching search technology that would integrate with its overall information management plans. “We wanted one place to store and manage information and one search tool that would work equally well for everyone,” says Colon.
Solution
Gallup chose Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007, which provides an integrated set of server capabilities that Gallup uses to support global collaboration and content management. Enterprise Search is one of those capabilities, providing robust, reliable, and accurate search across structured and unstructured information, including e-mail messages and contacts in the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 messaging and collaboration client. “We can take advantage of a SharePoint-based intranet and business productivity infrastructure to integrate search with collaboration, portal, and content management scenarios,” says Colon. “The value for us is that it all happens seamlessly, right out of the box.”
Gallup chose Enterprise Search because it helps employees search for people and expertise using the My Site feature in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Available as an integral offering within Office SharePoint Server 2007, My Site is a personal site that all Gallup employees use as a central location to manage and store personal content. My Site serves as a point of contact for Gallup employees to find out about one another, including everyone’s top five strengths. Gallup is particularly excited about the potential of both My Site and Enterprise Search to provide a way for employees to search for and connect with subject matter experts. The combination of Enterprise Search and My Site builds a social map of the organization, helping Gallup employees connect with people around the world, without leaving their desks. This would help new hires find the expertise they need to ask questions, or the right person to mentor with.
The Gallup team worked with Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) to define the architecture and design for its new intranet and collaboration infrastructure. The company plans to migrate all the content from the old intranet to the new, re-branded intranet site by the first quarter of 2009. As of October 2008, approximately 20 percent, or 3,000 documents, have been migrated to the new solution.
Gallup plans to roll out collaboration portals, divisional sites, team sites, and a publishing portal—all enabled for Enterprise Search. “People are craving an area where they can discuss, share, collaborate, and communicate on a particular project,” says Theer. “Our client teams are anxious to use SharePoint sites and tools to better service our clients through more efficient team communication. We can now provide easily accessible frequently asked questions (FAQs) and our new hires are looking forward to using this feature and becoming a little more self sufficient in fulfilling their information needs.”
MCS introduced Gallup to Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Inetium to configure its search solution. The first step involved defining a custom content type from which all Gallup documents are built. The Gallup team and Inetium worked together to define custom meta data that Gallup employees can use in their search queries to refine their results. “We used the Search Center with Tabs, and from there the data was transformed using some custom Extensible Style Language Transformation in the Search Core Results Web Part,” says Kirk Hofer, Senior Developer, Inetium. “Enabling data as managed properties that match up against Gallup people and Gallup documents help to refine the search criteria and deliver relevant results. For example, the People Search interface allows Gallup employees to narrow the search criteria using their top five, their locations, their skills, and the languages they speak. These managed properties enable searchers to refine their people search and they use them frequently.”
“We can’t say enough about the expertise of our Inetium consultant,” says Roselius. “He knew SharePoint so well that he had an answer for every question we asked. The knowledge transfer we have gained during this deployment is incredible.”
Inetium also implemented faceted search to help Gallup information workers narrow down their searches. Faceted search provides an intuitive way for people to refine search results by categories, or facets. Popular facets defined by Gallup users included document category and type of document, including Portable Document Format files (PDFs), Microsoft Office Word, etc. To augment the information available the My Site feature, Inetium also helped create a custom import function that delivers structured human resource (HR) information from Oracle PeopleSoft into Office SharePoint Server 2007. The data was mapped to User Profile properties, and these properties were marked as being indexed, which turned them into Managed Properties in SharePoint. Managed Properties can be exposed via the People search so Gallup employees can easily find people and drill down on more detailed properties.
“Enterprise Search increases the value of our information management investments,” adds Colon. “Consolidating information and deploying My Site is a good start, but it’s the search tool that will deliver the results.”
Benefits
With Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Enterprise Search, Gallup acquired a superior search engine and an extensible content management and collaboration solution that deliver added value by democratizing information access across the organization. For Gallup, that value comes from integrated technologies that help people find the knowledge and the expertise they need from the applications they use on a daily basis. For example, within Microsoft Office Word 2007, staff can easily assign Gallup pre-defined meta data to their documents as they add them to the SharePoint libraries. This ensures a fast and consistent search experience for all Gallup employees.
Gallup researchers and consultants thrive on collaboration that takes advantage of peers’ expertise and fast access to relevant information. “As part of an overall information management and collaboration solution, Enterprise Search is a key enabling technology that maps to our people-based culture and helps unlock our valuable information assets,” says Theer. “We are also empowering our information workers to provide better service and boost productivity.”
Unlocking Information Assets
Gallup employees use the My Site and search capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to easily find and share information and expertise. As the Gallup IT team migrates more documents onto the intranet, an increasing amount of corporate information will be available for search. Employees are thrilled that they have gone from not being able to retrieve a document at all to finding everything they need. “The new search capabilities and the accuracy of the results are like night and day compared to the previous solution,” says Theer. “We’re just so excited that what we search for actually comes up. We didn’t have that before. So instead of wasting time looking for something, we can get to work quickly. Better search has made a big difference helping new associates to quickly become productive, a boon as we expand our workforce.”
The wholesale endorsement of My Site at Gallup reflects the business value the company sees in social network technologies that bring people together. Enterprise Search adds to that value because information workers can use the tool to search My Site content, opening up a whole network of experts and colleagues that represent the company’s impressive intellectual capital. “At Gallup, people search is our most popular tool,” says Roselius. “Easily finding and accessing our scientists, some of whom are Nobel Prize winners, is a huge tactical benefit for our client-facing teams.”
“The ability to search in My Site by clicking on an indexed field to pull up everyone with certain information has been a huge hit,” adds Theer. And after Gallup and Inetium built a daily data import from the HR system into the SharePoint environment, they unlocked HR data previously unavailable for enterprise search and access by the rest of the organization. Now people can use that information for their My Site biographies.