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Enterprise Search at A.T. KearneyEnterprise Search at A.T. Kearney

Amin NegandhiCo-Founder, Partner, Echelon Consulting, LLC

An overview of the industry leading search toolsets that givesA.T. Kearney a significant competitive advantage.

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Presentation Overview

Who is A.T. Kearney

Defining the Challenge

How Oracle Secure Enterprise Search is Used

Competitive Advantage

Solid Return on Investment

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Who is A.T. Kearney?

A full-service, high value business management consulting company founded in 1926.

Helps the world’s leading corporations gain and sustain competitive advantage and achieve profound tangible results.

Headquartered in Chicago, with over 50 offices internationally.

A.T. Kearney is a recognized global leader in delivering superior value to clients through a unique combination of thought leadership and strategic impact.

A.T. Kearney’s continued success depends upon the ability to deliver knowledge and expertise accurately, efficiently and professionally.

• 98.4 percent rate A.T. Kearney's overall performance excellent or good.

• 98.1 percent rate expertise as excellent or good.

• 95.7 percent rate collaboration with clients teams as excellent or good.

Efficiently and effectively accessing and sharing knowledge is a key differentiation between A.T. Kearney and our competitors.

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Defining the Challenge

Knowledge is A.T. Kearney’s primary market differentiation.

Experience and expertise with solving global business issues has drivenA.T. Kearney’s business model for over 75 years.

Leveraging existing knowledge and providing access to that knowledge, on a global scale, is fundamental to A.T. Kearney’s ability to rapidly, accurately and effectively assist clients.

Size complicates the equation. Global offices provide local expertise and experiences that can be leveraged. However identifying that knowledge and leveraging it can be a challenge.

Retaining client confidentiality is paramount in our industry – sharing knowledge is key.

Any and all of our tools must provide…

• Easy, rapid identification and location capabilities

• Remain sensitive to client confidentialities and protect them

• Share information and integrate with multiple knowledge management tools and technologies

• Remain cost competitive

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Why A.T. Kearney selected Oracle Secure Enterprise Search

Need a search resource that can provide access to distributed information, from a variety of diverse information resources

• Information repositories range from highly structured relational databases to free-form formats such as word processing documents, presentations, emails, in-house chat rooms and instant messaging programs.

Any search technology deployed must effectively protect data using existing authentication, access control and security policy resources.

Competitive tools reviewed didn’t have a well thought out security architecture and didn’t provide a complete solution for retaining information security within our existing environments.

Need a tool that could evolve and adapt with us as our Knowledge Management tools are refined and adapted to present business requirements.

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A key component to our competitive advantage…

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search is a core component and enabling technology within our @Knowledge portal resource

@Knowledge provides a searchable gateway into A.T. Kearney’s most valuable knowledge repositories

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search provides the essential link that allows our consulting teams to locate, identify and leverage past knowledge on a global scale

It retains client confidentiality by recognizing and leveraging existing data and document security information on individual systems

• When information is located that is protected, “owner” information is available so contact and requests for access can be made efficiently and rapidly

Tight integration with web enabled technologies provides a clean, single sign-on security platform with simple, common and easy to use interfaces

Easy, powerful tools that leverage Oracle Secure Enterprise Search deliver fast, reliable and accurate results

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Familiar “Search Bar”

Simple, free text search term interface delivers simple, common search interface for all users of all

languages.

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Tight integration with multiple knowledge repositories

Ability to define what knowledge resource is searched, providing essential granularity – improving search accuracy and delivering specific control to search user.

Provides unlimited power while rapidly delivering results.

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In addition to “Search Bar” ability to conduct precise meta-data-based searches (e.g., author)

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search’s flexibility allows us to also provide a more structured

search format – addressing specific user search preferences and delivering highly accurate,

immediate search results.

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Search result paragraphs are tuned to the specifications of the data / application owner

Search results are displayed by knowledge source, providing

immediate information on where that information is located.

Integration with @Knowledge toolset provides “single-click”

immediate access to the knowledge resource via single

sign-on.

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Seamless integration with Intranet such that search is omnipresent

Complete integration allows us to deliver a single, searchable

knowledge portal that all knowledge workers can

efficiently leverage.

Delivers flexibility by allowing each user to search, use and contribute information to the global knowledge resources.

Integration with existing security infrastructure provides

customization and focus to the resource.

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The key to enterprise search is not just the technology – it is the process and culture of keeping content fresh and relevant

To keep content fresh, it was essential for us to “tap into” user-accepted collaboration areas and keep the barriers / pain of submitting knowledge to a minimum

Interestingly, the culture of the firm has moved toward the “Web 2.0” way of working because our users are now frequent users of LinkedIn, hi5, Google Docs, etc. They have come to expect a certain level of intuitive ease when working with applications, and our findings have been that the closer we are to this paradigm, the more readily our users are willing to use it.

To some extent or another, most of us have some characteristics that could be considered vain. In our view, this partially explains the success of social networking sites such as Facebook. We have creatively tapped into this phenomenon to lure users to our knowledge search application.

To actually have content to index, it was key that we convinced our content / application owners to participate. To achieve this we focused on two areas:

• Resolute adherence to security

• Ability for the owners to design their own search result “paragraphs”

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Tapping into user-accepted team workspaces to capture knowledge with minimal barriers

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Tapping into user-accepted team workspaces to capture knowledge with minimal barriers (continued)

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A Clear Return on Investment

Enterprise search functionality is a dynamic, enabling technology that…

• Time is money. Enterprise Search speeds knowledge location.

• Directly improves and impacts the quality of knowledge services we provide.

• Rapidly finds specific knowledge expertise resources within the firm, reducing research and preparatory time and costs.

Becomes a trusted, valued knowledge resource within the enterprise

• Integrated, flexible but accurate security protects highly sensitive data, while allowing others to identify that it exists and tracks who “owns” that knowledge

Easier access to knowledge and knowledge experts directly impacts the quality and depth of the knowledge we deliver to our clients.

• Positions A.T. Kearney more competitively

• Delivers higher quality knowledge and expertise to client

• Drives high satisfaction levels with our services, facilitates repeat business

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A Clear Return on Investment (continued)

Serves as the glue between our various applications by reporting search results across all of them in one place

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Enterprise Search at A.T. KearneyEnterprise Search at A.T. Kearney

Amin NegandhiCo-Founder, Partner, Echelon Consulting, LLC

An overview of the industry leading search toolsets that givesA.T. Kearney a significant competitive advantage.