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Challenge Solution Product Benefit Maria Dolores Arribas-Banos |
Overview
The World Bank Group is one of the world's largest sources of financial assistance for developing countries. Its 8,000 employees in Washington, D.C. and 2,000 field staff work to raise living standards in poor countries around the world with technical assistance and a wide range of loan and grant programs. In fiscal year 2002, this international agency provided more than US$19 billion in loans to client countries throughout Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.
In doing its critical development work, the World Bank produces a vast array of research and data used extensively by organizations across the globe, including universities, government agencies, non-governmental organizations and the private sector.
The Challenge
The Bank’s global reach is reflected in its intranet, which hosts hundreds of independent websites with more than 200,000 files on 445 servers, all of which are maintained by some 400 internal content providers around the world. All 10,000 Bank employees have access through an intranet home page which provides a comprehensive picture of the Bank's online resources and consolidates internal and external organization-wide communications.
The World Bank intranet contains documents in all the standard business applications and in every format from HTML to PDF. Loan officers and economic development specialists, technical experts and field staff all use the World Bank intranet to locate myriad project documents, case studies, health and environmental reports and complex financial data.
Using a prior search tool, World Bank intranet users made about 1,500 queries a day – but according to surveys, they were not satisfied with the results. The previous search application made it difficult to access all sites across the network, or return useful results on environmental assessment policy, education project details, or poverty statistics. “Before, you pretty much had to go to each individual repository to find something*,” says Intranet Project Team Leader and Information Management Officer Maria Dolores Arribas-Banos.
“Not only did our users have to cope with a poor search tool,” she says “But they could not conduct e-business efficiently. Add in the cost of overall site maintenance, and the fact that the volume of information on World Bank’s sites doubles each year, and we had a major headache.”
The Solution
Looking for a new solution, the team signed up to test the Google Search Appliance GB-1001. The initial setup took less than one hour, and even indexing a tiny sample of five intranet pages demonstrated how much content the Google Search Appliance uncovers, reported Arribas-Banos. “A big portion of our site had not been updated in a long time. The need for cleaning up the content became very evident.”
During a month-long trial, the Bank’s web team explored such Google Search Appliance features as interface customization, so users see search results in the same look and feel as the rest of the intranet. Beyond this integrated interface is a search engine that integrates seamlessly with the existing network. “They don’t have to pick among a bunch of incomplete or incomprehensible search repositories. Now they can search the whole intranet, or narrow their search to a particular section.”*
Since the World Bank materials are often available in a number of languages, Google’s ability to easily handle content searches and indicate which content is available in which languages is a big advantage. Users can also toggle back and forth through language versions, which makes the intranet overall and search results in particular more relevant and productive.
Since users already knew and liked Google, deploying GB-1001 throughout the organization was painless. Several organization-wide email messages informed the staff of the switch, and the web team offered a few demonstrations. No formal training was necessary.
Results
The Google Search Appliance has proven to be a cost-effective search solution for the World Bank, reports Arribas-Banos: “It takes no time to set up, and no developer resources.”* Not only does the World Bank spend less time on search administration, but it also spends less money. Over the next two years, she estimates that the GB-1001 will cost the Bank less than one-fifth what the prior search tool would have cost for maintenance alone.
As the number of documents on the network continues to grow at a considerable pace, the Google Search Appliance easily handles double the number of user queries per month over the old system just one year ago. The web team can focus on other initiatives instead of fixing search-related problems, says Arribas-Banos. “Search was a huge win. People actually called us up to say how well it was working, which was a pleasant surprise.”*
About the Google Search Appliance
The Google Search Appliance is an integrated corporate search solution that extends Google’s award-winning search technology to intranets and websites. The Google Search Appliance is available in three models: the GB-1001 for departments and mid-sized companies; the GB-5005 for dedicated, high-priority search services such as customer-facing websites and company-wide intranet applications; and the GB-8008 for centralized deployments supporting global business units.
*"Intranet Design Annual 2002: The Ten Best Intranets of the Year," by Kara Pernice Coyne, Candice Goodwin, and Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group, September 2002.
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