How Search & Relevance Technology Improves a Fast-Growing Financial Services Firm’s Return on Knowledge

Case Study By Simon Hazlitt, Information Director & Co-Founder, Majedie Asset Management

As a growing emerging asset management firm, our knowledge ecosystem across 130 institutional clients has grown considerably after just 10 years in business.  We built Majedie in a cloud-based environment, and we realized that much of our relevant information fell across disparate systems, each with its own specific search functionality.

The primary Achilles heel of a cloud-based information structure is that it can be very atomized.  We had pools of information in lots of difference places, with an increasing rate of information creation. In those 10 years, Majedie Asset Management had gone from a startup to having 3.3 million information items. Consequently, the users were diving into all different places to get the full picture.

Our knowledge base was a conglomeration of Salesforce, Outlook emails, and SharePoint, along with a multitude of file systems and databases.  If a user needed to find specific information on a company within a particular portfolio, the fund analyst searched each tool separately, correlating the results themselves after examining the knowledge found in each system.

Knowledge management at our company was a largely intuitive process before we implemented a search & relevance solution.  In a business that’s relatively small, users sort of ‘know where it is.’  Finding information was like finding items around your house.  You put a document somewhere; you naturally know where to find it.

However, as our company knowledge base expanded dramatically, traditional methods for storing and finding information became less and less productive.  So we decided to spearhead a process for designing and implementing a system that could index, correlate and present the knowledge base in an effective manner for its users.  Today, at Majedie, it no longer matters where information is stored—whether it is in SharePoint or a fileshare. That is secondary.  What matters is the content itself, which can always be located.  The internet is everywhere.

After evaluating a number of vendor solutions, we selected Coveo for its ability to connect with a multitude of different cloud-based systems; consolidate the information regardless of source or format, in a unified index; ensure its relevance to the user; and finally, present the information within the user’s context, in a way that encourages engagement.

The first area impacted by search & relevance technology was our deep integration of SharePoint, as analysts had integrated the application into a highly-populated wiki with relevant internal information about various portfolio assets. Users now have the ability to tag various documents and pieces of information about past dealings with each entity, allowing for new discoveries about portfolio assets for increased financial insight. It is at the intersection of such information and people that we can uncover more value to create and share with our customers. Whether information is in SharePoint, Salesforce Chatter, or any other system, it is easily surfaced and related.

Users apply real-time taxonomy, configuration and customization to their “knowledge engagement” via Coveo today. In the past, in KM circles, this would have been a laborious process of classification, taxonomies and tagging. Now, if a research analyst wants to know the financial performance of a mobile carrier, for example, she has the ability to tag a secondary stock, like a cell phone manufacturer.  If an analyst would rely on making manual correlations and tags on that relationship, then we would get probably 20 values.  But with search & relevance technology, we bring up both things that have been consciously and unconsciously tagged. It’s very useful, because you can find a relevant correlation about two companies that you wouldn’t have otherwise known.

Mobility is important to our professionals on the road.  Each employee has the ability to use their tablet to run Coveo through the Sharepoint app.  I can get an email on the train, and then search the entire content engine through the tablet.  It’s powerful and convenient.

Due to our exceptional degree of customer service, we have ranked either first or second in a quality study on institutional investors from Greenwich Associates.  With one of the most important qualities in the study being rapid response to ad hoc queries, the application allows for relevant insight, in real-time, from anywhere.  People say that service is a function of scale.  We disagree.  It’s a function of efficiency and alignment.

While the current benefits have been realized across our user base – from analyst to CEO – I believe that as our knowledge and information continue to expand rapidly, the ability to generate relevant results will prove to be increasingly critical for the firm to stay competitive.  When we begin examining assets, we don’t know how the content should ideally be arranged at the beginning.  Without search & relevance technology, finding appropriate correlations would depend on a superhuman ability to predict what considerations you’ll need to apply to information.  Technology that can index and correlate data is the only way to deal with the explosion of content that we’re all seeing.

Collective knowledge has become one of the organization’s most important internal assets.  Looking at our organization in the next five years, this technology will become indispensable.