SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT LEADERSHIP FOR INNOVATIVE BUSINESS

Marek Kowalkiewicz, Konrad JuenemannSAP Research

Improving information quality inemail exchanges by identifyingentities and related objects

External reports and user studies

AIIM on Ford Motor Company: knowledge workers spend 15–25% of their time on non-productive information–related activities.

Time Wasted Searching (IDC*) A general average of time spent searching: 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30% of the

workday. Only 50 % of searchers led to successful results.

Assumptions: salary = USD80000 annual plus benefits, 1000 knowledge workers, 2.5 hours searching on average, 50% of the information not indexed properly.

Result: An enterprise employing 1,000 knowledge workers wastes $48,000 per week, or nearly $2.5 million per year, due to an inability to locate and retrieve information.

In the aggregate, the Fortune 1000 stands to waste at least $2.5 billion per year due to an inability to locate and retrieve information.

http://www.viapoint.com/doc/IDC%20on%20The%20High%20Cost%20Of%20Not%20Finding%20Information.pdf

Trends

Mash-ups are becoming more and more important

Context-enriching technologies predominantly used in Web advertising

Operating systems and standard applications collect related information (Apple Mail)

Current situation

Email still a killer application, especially in businesses

Emails often suffer from low contextual information quality -> automatic provision of related information can improve that

Entity recognition technologies have matured -> can we use them to improve contextual information quality?

Object identification

NER – a subject of NLP

The best systems achieve over 93% of f-measure (humans: around 97%) in NER

Popular NER systems Open source: ANNIE Dual licence: Calais Commercial: ThingFinder

Yowie – Situation & Proposed Solution

Situation

Proposed Solution

Facilitating Technology / Selected Industries

Image

• Data and information volumes reaching epidemic levels

• Employees spending up to 25% of their time searching (but often not finding)

• Problem: „I don’t know what I need to know”

• Text processing technologies have matured

• MS Office has become fully extensible

• Create one-stop-shop for information gathering

• Provide actionable information (+ links to actions)

• Seamlessly integrate with standard office tools

• Become fully extensible and transparent to users

• Text analytics technology from Business Objects

• Business productivity software (i.e. MS Office)

• Cross-industry solution

• Defense as a first proof-of-concept industry

1. Analyse text1. Analyse text

2. Collect and showinformation

2. Collect and showinformation

3. Link to actions

3. Link to actions

4. Trigger externalapplications

4. Trigger externalapplications

Yowie in MS Outlook

Yowie4Outlook• Fully integrated with MS Outlook 2007

• Ability to access internal information (contact folders, email content)

• Ability to create new documents in Outlook (emails, appointments)

• Pre-fetching related information as emails arrive

• Caching (pre-) fetched information for future use

• Customisable

Yowie in MS Word

Yowie4Word• Fully integrated with MS Word 2007

• Processing documents of any size

• Highlighting recognized entities

• Customisable roles

Yowie – Architecture

Integration with Business ProductivitySoftware

Access to other Applications (e.g. ERP)

Make it easy to extend Yowie

to support new entities /provide new actions

Recognize Entities

“Host Plugins”

“Guest Plugins”

Inxight ThingFinder™

“Modules”

Yowie – Architecture

© SAP 2008 / Page 10

Yowie Local (Application Domain)

DLL

Entity Recognition Engine(ThingFinder 4.2)

Web-Server

Host Plugin (Application Domain)

Guest Plugin (Application Domain)

Entity Recognition Engine(ThingFinder 4.2)

Yowie Host Plugin

Yowie GuestPlugin

Wrapper N

Yowie Local

R

Postprocessor N

Yowie Connector

Yowie / ThingFinder Mapper

R

Postprocessor 1

Wrapper 1

R

R

YowieRegistry

R

.NET Remoting

.NET Remoting

R

RWebService

© SAP 2008 / Page 10

“Host Plugins”

“Guest Plugins”

Inxight Thingfinder

“Modules”

…Sammy…

{Sammy Jankis,email=…}

{Sammy Jankis,email=…,revenue=…}

{Sammy Jankis,email=…,revenue=…}

Prototype summary

Directly access data and functionality in business productivity software

Able to access ERP, Web Services, applications, …

Extensible, modular architecture

Supports “hot-plugging” of modules

Automatic module composition

Offers background processing, caching, uniform configuration

Supports definition of user roles

THANK YOU!Contact: Marek.Kowalkiewicz@sap.com