4-page Case Study - Posted 6/23/2008

Views: 1161

Rate This Evidence:

Piper Jaffray

Investment Bank Boosts Collaboration, Document Management, Enterprise Search

As Piper Jaffray grew, so did its need for more effective collaboration, information sharing, and enterprise search capabilities in order to support its international workforce and business operations. The company worked with Inetium, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, to adopt a new collaboration and search solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Collaboration sites are now easy to set up, so they’re used wherever needed to support company projects. More people can publish and target information to specific subsets of employees, so the intranet is more relevant and popular. Enterprise search results are “astronomically” more relevant, according to one manager, enabling employees to make better use of the company’s online documents and resources.

Situation

When investment bank and institutional securities firm Piper Jaffray was founded in 1895, the world moved more slowly. Back then, instantly sharing documents and collaborating with colleagues halfway around the world was unheard of, as was finding one document among tens of thousands in just seconds.

Today, of course, all that has changed. Piper Jaffray has grown into a 1,200-person firm with net revenue of U.S.$498.9 million in 2007 and 28 offices worldwide. And with that growth has come the need for global collaboration, enterprise-wide searching of documents, and unprecedented levels of content management.

Limits on Collaboration

The technology overhead required to set up collaboration sites was so considerable that very few of these sites were created. Instead, document sharing took place through e-mail, which put a strain on the system as larger attachments were sent throughout the enterprise and created document version-control problems for employees. The lack of a custom, automated workflow to move various types of documents through the environment exacerbated this problem.

Outgrowing Content Management

Piper Jaffray had an aging intranet, content management, and document repository system. The solution delivered content to the entire company but wasn’t programmed to deliver personalized content to specific groups within the company, such as a given office or region, particular department, or managers and directors. As the firm grew with two strategic acquisitions in 2007 (adding almost 12 percent to its employee base), the ability to target content to employee subgroups became increasingly important.

There is no question that increased communication and collaboration enabled by SharePoint Server 2007 will increase our productivity. Kathy Swanson Vice President of Internet Marketing, Piper Jaffray

“There was a large learning curve,” adds Kathy Swanson, Vice President, Internet Marketing, Piper Jaffray. “When the content got old and expired, it caused links to become broken, so that a technology resource had to find the content and ‘un-expire’ it.”

Outdated parts of the intranet site—such as headlines on the home page—weren’t removed in a timely way. Because users knew the site contained aging material, they were less inclined to make frequent use of it.

Minimal Search Ability

Additionally, the previous technology solution did not offer the level of search capability that Piper Jaffray needed.

“We had 10,000 documents on the site, including HTML pages, PDFs, and images—a huge amount of information—but people would continually say that they didn’t know where to find anything,” says Swanson. “Investment bankers work through the night while they’re on a deal. When they need a specific piece of information at 11 p.m., if they can’t find it, there aren’t many coworkers up at that hour for them to call.”

According to Klabunde, “Employees became frustrated.”

A common theme among these limitations was the need to make intranet capabilities—such as collaboration, content management, and search—easier and more effective so they could be implemented on a self-serve basis by business users when needed.

Solution

Various collaboration, enterprise content management, and search products were considered to address these issues, but Klabunde and his colleagues were concerned about the need to create and maintain custom code—and to train their developers in an unfamiliar technology such as Java—in order to achieve the functionality that they sought.

The company ultimately chose to re-architect and implement a new intranet based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. By standardizing technology on the Microsoft environment, the company realized it could achieve a solution that was integrated with the rest of its infrastructure and cost less than other options. The company began its use of Office SharePoint Server 2007 in a relatively simple way—by creating an information gateway (a new version of the company’s Trading Post intranet site) and a few collaboration sites—in order to become familiar with the software and its capabilities. Piper Jaffray is continuing to roll out SharePoint Server 2007 capabilities in phases.

Features for Collaboration

The collaboration sites include document sharing, team calendars, and other features such as internal blogs. Groups of investment bankers, traders, and researchers use the blogs to comment within their groups on specific securities, trends within and across securities, and related interests. According to Klabunde, “Our employees have been using these features for several months now and have found them to be very effective.”

Figure 1: The Piper Jaffray intranet home page, Trading Post, now features streamlined navigation and a customized selection of updated headlines that are relevant to each employee.

Content Management Out-of-the-Box

Using Office SharePoint Server 2007 features, Piper Jaffray has expanded its document publishing and content management capabilities to include business users throughout the company. List-based document publishing enables people to publish documents (without knowing HTML) by completing easy-to-use forms that specify what should be published where and to whom. By taking advantage of the Windows Server® 2003 Active Directory® service, Piper Jaffray is able to target people in specific offices, regions, jobs, or other categories through enhanced publishing capabilities. When employees visit the Trading Post site, they see personalized content that is intended specifically for them.

To apply principles of governance to what is published and how, Piper Jaffray is using the workflow capability in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to route draft content to managers for approval before posting. Since the financial services industry is subjected to government regulation, workflow and document retention are important to the company.

Piper Jaffray is about to roll out a workflow process for bringing new employees on board. By migrating the formerly paper-based steps of the new-hire process to electronic forms using InfoPath® Forms Services and Office SharePoint Server 2007, workflow for integrating new employees has become more automated, leaving a smaller margin for error.

Using Search

As Piper Jaffray expanded its use of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to include enterprise search, it turned to Inetium, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Inetium helped Piper Jaffray with search optimization and relevance improvement, which enabled wildcard search capabilities for both content and employee information. To improve relevance, Inetium consultants configured the weighing of metadata properties to ensure that when users performed searches, the most relevant information was returned. Several Microsoft .NET customizations were implemented in the core Piper Jaffray master page and layout pages to exclude certain page-level content, such as navigation and footer content, from being indexed. Inetium also enabled wildcard searching on results pages for both content and people search, to improve the reach of keyword searches. It also helped Piper Jaffray to expand its use of metadata tags to take advantage of the ability to search by such tags to find documents more quickly and accurately.

In addition, Piper Jaffray is using the Business Data Catalog in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to access content from other back-end systems, such as the Piper Jaffray Human Resources system, to populate the employee profiles. This has made such information easily accessible through search.

The solution runs on two application and Web servers that use Windows Server Clustering for greater availability, including Network Load Balancing to enhance performance. A two-computer cluster running Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 database software supports the Office SharePoint Server 2007 database, and separate servers support development and test environments.

Benefits

With its new intranet solution, Piper Jaffray is seeing increased collaboration among employees, streamlined publishing and information sharing, and more relevant enterprise search results. The company expects further benefits when the solution is put to broader use with additional work loads and users.

Enables Crucial Collaboration

Business users have capitalized on the ability to create collaboration sites—not only within departments and other organizational units, but also across departments—to bring together employees and documents from different teams who are involved in a given project.

“Better and faster collaboration is crucial to our continued growth and success,” says Swanson. “We didn’t have that capability before. Now, with the solution in Office SharePoint Server, we do. We can bring employees together to collaborate as appropriate, and restrict access to authorized information as appropriate.”

Figure 2: The Piper Jaffray Trading Post enables employees to search for relevant expertise from throughout the company.

Provides Faster, Easier Content Management, Information Sharing

The ability to publish information more quickly and easily makes the Trading Post intranet site more relevant and useful. And that, in turn, makes it more popular.

“Use of the intranet site has already increased, and as we expand our use of Office SharePoint Server 2007, we expect to see it climb significantly,” says Swanson. “The Trading Post is becoming the place to go to get the information that you need—and only the information that you need. It’s not a one-for-all site; the information that a user sees is customized for him or her. That makes it a tremendously more valuable tool for our employees.”

For example, Swanson cites the difference in the news headlines posted on the site. Instead of the aging, possibly irrelevant headlines that the site formerly hosted, headlines are now targeted to be highly relevant. They are also archived according to the end date that each publisher designates as most appropriate for the headline, so users always see information that is relevant to them.

“We wanted to empower people,” says Swanson. “We wanted to create a resource that would help employees get their jobs done.” The solution also helps the IT department spend less time on workflows and more time on strategic initiatives.

“The ability to share and exchange information and viewpoints through blogs makes Piper Jaffray users better informed about events and issues that affect them, and that makes them better at what they do,” adds Swanson. “There is no question that increased communication and collaboration enabled by SharePoint Server 2007 will increase our productivity.”

Increases Search Relevancy “Astronomically”

Before adopting Office SharePoint Server 2007, Piper Jaffray didn’t have an effective enterprise search solution. The new solution now produces search results that are “astronomically more relevant than they were before,” according to Swanson.

Klabunde attributes the greater search relevancy to the enterprise search engine in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and also to what he calls the “deep search expertise” of the consultant.

“Inetium showed us what to include and what to exclude when we are doing searches,” he says. “As a result, our staff spends less time looking for information and more time using information to be more productive. This helps us be more responsive to our clients.”

Provides Foundation for Further Solutions

As Piper Jaffray rolls out additional Office SharePoint Server 2007 capabilities, the company sees more ways to put the software to work. For example, the same ability to integrate SharePoint Server 2007 with structured data through the Business Data Catalog also makes it possible to integrate SharePoint Server 2007 with the system that produces photo ID cards for employees. This allows employee photos to be included with employee profile information on the intranet.

In addition, Piper Jaffray is planning to use Office SharePoint Server 2007 workflow capabilities to facilitate business processes—such as streamlining activities when new employees are hired. The various processes involved with new employees include setting up telephones, computers, security clearances, and other resources. Currently, these are manual processes that take at least three days per new employee. Klabunde estimates that automating these processes using SharePoint Server 2007 will shave at least one day off that time.

“We’re expecting to grow quickly, and bringing on new people has always been a challenge,” says Klabunde. “SharePoint Server will help us address this real business need.”

Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:
www.microsoft.com/office

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com

For more information about Inetium products and services, call (952) 646-0800 or visit the Web site at:
www.inetium.com

For more information about Piper Jaffray products and services, call (612) 303-6000 or visit the Web site at:
www.piperjaffray.com