Case Study – IMF

Back in 2007, Applied Relevance hung out a shingle as a consulting firm specializing in enterprise search professional services.   We figured 10 years implementing enterprise search and taxonomy projects for some of the most prestigious companies in the world gave us the street cred to solve some pretty big problems.  And so it did.   We landed projects for organizations like Businessweek, Conde Nast, MPS Group, and Jane’s Defence Publishing in our first year of existence.

But  AR was most fortunate in those days to be invited to provide professional services for the International Monetary Fund. This is a prestigious institution, and we were honored to have the opportunity to work with some of the smartest people, quite literally,  from all over the world.

Not every organization has the foresight to understand the importance of enterprise search and particularly the  role of taxonomies in organizing and finding documents.   IMF gets it.   They understand that timely and accurate access to critical enterprise documents is fundamental to the success of the organization – now more than ever.

Over time, it became clear that IMF needed a new search engine – preferably one that can support taxonomies.   The problem is, not very many search engines support taxonomies.   And those that do don’t really take them seriously.   On the other side of the coin, not many taxonomy and ontology management system treat enterprise search that seriously.   What they really needed was a way to combine powerful taxonomy management and automatic tagging with a fast, scalable search engine.

FAST Search and Transfer – more than a recursive acronym

Right around the time that Microsoft acquired the Norwegian company FAST Search and Transfer, the IMF began evaluating candidates for a new enterprise search and taxonomy system to power their “Knowledge Exchange” project.  FAST was the natural choice.   It is mature and powerful, and was soon to be incorporated deeply into SharePoint 2010.   IMF happened to be moving toward SharePoint as well, and had lots of in-house Microsoft expertise.   An in-depth evaluation led to the conclusion that FAST was the way to go.

Why Applied Relevance?

As I mentioned before, IMF are very keen on enterprise taxonomies.  They understood how they can be leveraged to help users find and navigate to the information they need.  While there are some good enterprise search and taxonomy systems out there, none of them really had the mix of features that they wanted or needed.   Plus, AR had already developed a version of the taxonomy manager and auto-tagger for SharePoint 2007 to IMF specifications to support their legacy system.  And it worked.

So, we ported AR·Semantics to SharePoint 2010 and FAST for SharePoint, and in the process did a lot of rewriting and streamlining of the code to make it truly enterprise ready.   The result is AR·Semantics for SharePoint, the IMF Knowledge Exchange, and this very nice case study from Microsoft.

Microsoft Case Study- Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 For Sharepoint – International Monetary Fund

Needless to say, we’re very grateful to IMF, and especially the Knowledge Engineering team for their vision, patience and support as AR grows and deploys our solutions to an ever growing list of organizations that understand the power of taxonomy and search.

The Science, Practice and Art of Classification - Enterprise Search Summit 2011