This FastForward 09 session was about Orion, a phrama firm, that implemented FAST search for both internal and external search at the same time. Auli Ella, Manager of Content Management and Collaboration at Orion led the session.   Orion is the largest Finnish phrama company with 3,000 employees. They do people and animal drugs and a lot of R&D.

It was hard to find information in all their databases and the over 500 eRooms. Search in vain was often the outcome. Mean time to not find information was about an hour before giving up.  There was a good ROI lurking here so they turned to Fast.  First, there was a pilot and the pilot was good.  They picked on bits and pieces from internal and external sources.  People were eager for this with the pain they were going through and they had their own ideas, many being researchers. Auli said they had to hush them down a bit but this better than apathy.  Once the pilot was finished, everyone wanted the full implementation.

The pilot showed support for both decision-making and innovation. You could find the unexpected.  Next, came the full implementation. They wanted to save time spent in vain.   They use Documentum 5.3 for content management, eRooms, and a Dcoumentation based intranet. The full implementation also included three external sources.  The search needed to respect the access rights of every source and yet let those who had access, get access.  Filters needed to make use of existing metadata since everyone spent so much time building this.

All the requirements were met with Fast.  One search box for all sources, proper security, and existing metadata could be used as filters.  People could also save their personal searches.  The CEO said “super system, works like a dream” in a phone message to Auli. She said she saves the message to listen on bad days.  Some people were suspicious since it was so fast.

Lesson learned included: always start with a pilot. Diversity of pilot users is important, keep it simple during the pilot, and be prepared for resistance.  The pilot can provide the business case to convince senior management.  In their case they picked all very highly skilled workers and should have picked people at all levels.  In summary, this was a good example of the value of enterprise search. They want to add structured data in the future.  The number one search item is the day’s cafeteria menu. These people know how to work.