Products: ISYS:desktop Organization: Lend Lease Corp. Industry: Project Management Data: 1,000 GB (.doc, .xls, .pdf, .dxf, .ppt) Benefit: Improved internal knowledge seeking, sharing and expertise location.

Expert Discovery -- Lend Lease leverages ISYS:desktop for expertise location

Established in 1958, Lend Lease Corporation is a leading real estate specialist, providing a range of project management, construction, development and investment management services. As a global organization with more than 9,000 employees, Lend Lease operates in more than 40 countries, with the majority of its operations focused on its core markets of the Americas, Asia Pacific and Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA).

Like most organizations its size, Lend Lease produces a significant amount of work product and knowledge each year. Recognizing the volume of its valuable corporate content, the company took a proactive approach to managing this information by establishing its ikonnect knowledge sharing service. According to ikonnect Facilitator Garry Cullen, this service was created to provide Lend Lease’s staff, and thus its clients, with “quick and direct access to the best available knowledge anywhere in the world.”

“As an internal Lend Lease service, ikonnect is primarily focused on assisting employees with business-related queries,” said Cullen. “Our job is to connect the ‘seeker of knowledge’ with the ‘bearer of wisdom’ so to speak. It’s actually a fairly innovative approach to corporate knowledge sharing, as its leveraging human facilitators to improve the connections between employees, rather than using databases or passive ‘Yellow Page’ systems. The net result is greater efficiency that translates into potentially millions of dollars in time saved.”

Incorporating rapid expertise location with ISYS:desktop search

Given the vast amount of information at their fingertips, Cullen’s ikonnect team required an advanced search solution capable of drastically reducing the amount of time it takes to sift and sort through data to find appropriate connections. Put simply, they needed a tool designed to enable rapid expertise location.

To fulfill this need, Lend Lease selected the ISYS:desktop search solution for its ikonnect team. By implementing ISYS:desktop’s advanced query and results navigation features, ikonnect facilitators can quickly and easily search across their vast server directories to locate relevant information and, more importantly, the authors behind the content. Cullen believes this intuitive functionality has greatly improved the ikonnect team’s ability to service Lend Lease’s internal customers.

“ISYS has astounded us with both the speed and the accuracy of its searches. We generally find what we are looking for with a single search string and a quick review of the documents. In fact, it has greatly improved our ability to both service our users who need an urgent response, but also to find connections to people that were previously hidden to us. To that end, ISYS has become an important discovery tool as well.”

The ikonnect team is initially using ISYS:desktop at its Sydney location to search across 1000 GB of data consisting of approximately 12 different file types, including Microsoft Office formats, Adobe PDF and CAD. Lend Lease will soon roll out this capability to other ikonnect offices worldwide, thus giving facilitators and their internal customers even greater depth and coverage.

Cullen described a recent example in which a Lend Lease employee (referred to by ikonnect facilitators as a ‘seeker’) urgently needed an example of a “Risk Management Plan.” A search of past ikonnect questions did not turn up an answer, so facilitators turned to ISYS. Using this phrase as a search string, the team quickly found two examples, which upon further review had an excellent fit with the seeker’s situation. These were then emailed to the seeker who was immediately able to contact the authors and, after a discussion, utilize them to create the needed document.

“Without ikonnect or ISYS, the seeker would have likely wasted countless hours searching for the relevant document. Upon follow up, the seeker was blown away that the ikonnect team had a tool like ISYS that could rapidly locate the relevant document. Needless to say, this capability further extends the timesaving value our team offers company employees.”