IWMW 2011 - David Hawking's Plenary Session on Increasing Efficiencies and Income with Search
The Institutional Web Management Workshop is underway in Reading in the UK. Now in its fifteenth year, the IWMW is an annual event which brings together institutional web professionals to update their skills, learn about emerging technologies, discuss the latest trends and share knowledge.
This year the theme of the event is "Responding to Change" - a natural evolution from last year's theme, "The Web In Turbulent Times". Universities have been hit hard by the economic crisis and subsequent budget cuts, and this year have had to respond to tuition fee increases. All of these events have put immense pressure on institutions to increase efficiencies and income.
David Hawking, Funnelback's Chief Scientist, presented a plenary session today, "Search Engines in the fight against Institutional Impecuniousness", which focused on the ways in which search can be used to help to increase efficiencies and income. Here is a summary of the main points of his presentation, followed by the presentation slides.
How Search Can Help to Increase Income
Increasing income relies on attracting students, research staff, grants, research funding, industrial partnerships and commercialisation of research. The university website is the central marketing tool for achieving these goals. It is imperative that university websites deliver an excellent user experience and enable the user to find the information they are looking for. Search plays a vital role in this by easing access to information, improving navigation and even guiding users in their search with features such as query completion.
Furthermore, search data can provide valuable business intelligence to help improve the web experience by monitoring campaign performance, exposing areas where search is not performing and highlighting changes in user behaviour.
How Search Can Help to Increase Efficiencies
Efficiencies can be sought through increasing employee productivity by maximising the accessibility of information assets and reducing the cost of enquiries by providing online services (with access to course materials, timetables, accommodation information, exam information etc.).
Improving Search
David discussed some issues which are common to all applications of search. These issues need to be considered and overcome as much as possible. For example, poor search queries, mismatched language between the user and the supplier of information, and ambiguous search queries can all be overcome with search features such as autocompletion, query blending, use of synonyms and best bets.
Tuning is another important consideration which should be used to measures how well your search is working, and to improve it. David also showcased the "Emmottiser" (named after LSE's Stephen Emmott) - a new content optimisation tool in Funnelback which shows the contributing factors to search ranking results and gives guidance on how content editors can manipulate their content to improve results for both internal and external search. Funnelback also offers similar tools which provide reports on accessibility compliance.
Here are the slides from David's presentation:
