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There aren't a lot of certainties about the new economy. But here's one: it's a knowledge economy.

Your organization is more powerful when everyone has currency. Give it to them with business intelligence search.


Once upon a time, people with uneven eyesight had to spend their days switching between two pairs of glasses. And then Benjamin Franklin invented the bifocal lens. It was by all accounts patchy, cumbersome, and ungainly, but with the passing of time and a few more committed inventors (probably with bad eyesight), it became a single, fused lens. Today it is also available as a contact lens for the most custom fit possible.

BI search has followed an arc like this, and now Clarity can help fit your organization with it.

You have BI capabilities that enable your users to query, visualize, and analyze information. It's quantitative, structured information that you anticipated needing, so you modeled it and organized it inside a data store like a warehouse or mart.

But that information is giving you only part of the picture.

Outside the confines of your data model is a rich and growing world of information that your business can profit from--or suffer from if it's not accessible to you. This is the semi-structured and unstructured information in research, product specifications, customer feedback, legal documents, emails, and the list goes on. (A sobering statistic: some industry analysts say it accounts for about 80% of your company's data.) 

To get at this information, your users put on a different pair of glasses: they use web and document search tools, perhaps  as part of a knowledge management program. They leave the BI environment, retrieve this information (or whatever pieces of it they can find), bring it back, and try to combine it with their BI analysis. It's what you might call patchy, cumbersome, and ungainly.

They also do something else that's slowing you down: they ask IT for custom cubes and views. The backlog of these requests means that almost none of them are fulfilled immediately, which is the gold standard for the agile business.

Clarity can help you architect a solution to this problem with BI search--the BI counterpart to the bifocal. New search technologies fuse retrieval with analysis, and meld qualitative information with quantitative data. This enables fingertip-ready information of all kinds in one place, plus the ability to filter, manipulate, cross reference, and analyze it in a user-experience environment.

Further, BI search enables--and encourages--customization based on things like industry and business function. So Clarity can help you architect the information that feeds your BI search applications, and build your industry standards into the design. Our solution and information architects are experienced across the industries in which our clients compete.

Our BI search services enable:

  • Less time, and less need for a crystal ball, in user requirements gathering. Search indices are flexible and adaptable in a way that traditional data models are not. Clarity can help you change and add to index content as you think of it, determine if it works, and change it again.
  • A BI search application that makes sense in, and operates as part of, your BI environment. BI search is not plug and play. It requires customization, and it also needs to be incorporated strategically into your solution architecture. Clarity is a full life cycle BI expert and systems integrator who can advise you on and implement BI search.
  • A truly data driven organization. BI search allows you to query a broad set of data to create more complete knowledge. This kind of knoweldge, rather than obedience to a predesigned model, is what helps you create better products and services.

To explore BI search, contact us today.



Search is one way to create more business value from more data.

Using our Strategy services to bring this data into your traditional BI environment is another. Learn more.

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