Enterprise Search at Procter & Gamble
The focus at this week’s Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit seemed to be less on search than in past years. But a presentation from Bud Miyahara of Procter & Gamble was a noted exception. (Full disclosure: P&G is a Vivisimo customer.)
Miyahara explained how P&G, a global consumer goods powerhouse with 18 billion-dollar brands, struggled with finding information. Interestingly enough, the company didn’t immediately recognize it had a search problem. Users were just constantly complaining that the information they needed were hidden from them. In fact, it topped the list of employee complaints – leading to a less efficient work force. A lack of a strong, centralized search solution led individual department owners to seek their own search product for their disparate sites. That’s a story we’ve heard a lot lately.
To stem these rogue implementations, Miyahara started an initiative to replace P&G’s legacy search with what he called a “next-generation findability” solution.
One of his top challenges was convincing management to invest in the solution. His advice was to throw out hard numbers and look at the overall impact that true enterprise search can have on an organization – especially one the size of P&G.
“If you do enterprise search, it’s probably the most integrated function in your company,” Miyahara said.
After getting management’s approval, P&G went live with enterprise search in only eight weeks. In the last few months, P&G’s search has evolved to include expertise location, topical clusters, federation and indexing of local content including the company’s various videos and still images.
Miyahara reported that there are 70,000 users on the system today, after a soft launch late last year. The average clicked result is the fifth on the page, which met P&G’s relevancy goal. The search solution is also uniting workers at this global company by bringing them together and enhancing collaboration.
“We’re trying to make the world a little bit smaller for our end users,” he said.
Miyahara also spoke during a webinar last year. If you are interested in listening in, click here. We’re also planning another P&G webinar for September. Bookmark our webinars page for the latest information.
What do you think of P&G’s approach to enterprise search? Would that kind of ROI argument work with your management?
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[...] disbursed work group came together in two months rather than in six to 12.” They have also publicly spoken about their deployment of enterprise search as a tool for improving knowledge worker productivity and overall discovery. Despite P&G’s [...]