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Applying the Power of Dialog Intranet Toolkit™: Focus on Pharmaceuticals

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Dialog Intranet Toolkit enables Information Professionals to build customized search applications that are sophisticated, yet easy to use, and that are precisely tailored to meet the needs of knowledge workers throughout an organization. To illustrate how Information Professionals can leverage their expertise to give desktop users point-and-click access to highly relevant information, this article will review some examples from the pharmaceutical industry.

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Meeting the Big Objective

Pharmaceutical companies rely on information to accomplish a wide variety of important business objectives, including: researching state-of-the-art, identifying new business opportunities, preventing duplication of effort, shortening product development time, monitoring industry and market conditions, and optimizing the use of resources and budgets. The big objective of the Information Professional is to deliver the right information, to the people who need it, when they need it, in a form they can use.

To this end, Information Professionals evaluate sources, select content, organize and categorize data, guide users to answers, and present results. Increasingly, Information Specialists are turning to Intranets to offer users easy access to the resources they need — at least in theory. In practice, many Intranets resemble a patchwork quilt of links to an unfiltered collection of resources. Furthermore, these resources are often governed by different search protocols. End users navigate and figure out how to extract information largely on their own, with questionable effectiveness.

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Dialog Intranet Toolkit — How it Can Help You Meet Your Objectives

With Dialog Intranet Toolkit, Information Professionals can take corporate Intranets to the next level — delivering better service to information users while simultaneously extending and elevating the reach of the Information Center. Drawing from a single content collection of unsurpassed depth and breadth, and a powerful set of flexible tools, Information Professionals can fully leverage their talents.

Dialog Intranet Toolkit features several powerful tools that are surprisingly easy to use.

Ready-Made Search Forms — Select from more than 200 search forms, created by experts, covering major vertical markets.

Custom Search Form Tool — Use to design customized gateways for ad hoc searching. Information Specialists can tailor the searches by specifying many options, including: the choice of databases and/or publications to be searched, preferences for Boolean or relevancy search strategies, removal of duplicates, the fields to be searched, indexing properties, limits and other restrictions, display formats, and sort options.

Saved Strategy Tool — Use to incorporate search strategies developed and saved using Dialog^®, DialogClassic™ on the Web, and DialogWeb™ into custom applications. With the Saved Strategy Tool, searches that are created by an Information Specialist are embedded into a URL, so that desktop users can enjoy true "one-click" access to current and/or archival content that is immediately relevant to their needs.

Intranet Delivery Tool — Use to publish search and Alert results directly to designated locations on your Intranet. The Intranet Delivery Tool channels data into categories that you define, using a taxonomy that you control.

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Unlimited Possibilities

The tools described above can be used to create an unlimited number of customized applications to meet the ever-changing needs of a company's knowledge workers. To illustrate how Dialog Intranet Toolkit can be used to further the objectives of a pharmaceutical company, here are examples from a demonstration site that was created with input from Dialog users in the pharmaceutical industry (see Figure 1).

The graphical appearance of sites created with Dialog Intranet Toolkit can be customized to match a company's "look and feel" and can include links to resources other than Dialog, like the Information Center, or the Web. To help answer ready-reference questions, you can add "Hot Topic" Links (see the "Quick Links" in Figure 1) that take users directly to title lists of the latest industry news, specific publications, or key data (see Figure 2). Users can then download the full text of articles that they need.

Figures 3a-d show a Patent Watch application, one of many possibilities, from the end-user's perspective. The Information Professional, with input from clients, creates a list of companies to be monitored and defines the kinds of searches end users can perform (see Figures 3a-b). The searches can be set up so that the user is taken directly to a list of titles or to a form requiring input (see Figure 3c). Figure 3c shows the search form that end users would see if they selected the links for "Abbott" and "Keyword (Current Patents)."

Because the databases and other search options used to create the form are hidden from view, the end user only sees a simple form. Figure 3d, however, shows the "hidden hand" of the Information Professional, the key to relevant results.

Figures 4a-b illustrate how data from multiple data sources can be merged into a knowledge bank for end users. The Product Profiles application was designed to offer users instant access to reports and studies from the scientific, patent, and marketing literature. Figure 4a shows the table that appears when the Product Profiles link is selected from the main Intranet page. With input from clients, an Information Professional can create a list of products and subtopics to be researched. The Information Professional then chooses the databases and search options that will yield the most relevant and precise results. Again, end users only see a simple interface, and they are only a click away from the information they need. If they select the "Scientific literature" link for Lipitor, for example, the system executes the search devised by the Information Professional and returns targeted results (see Figure 4b).

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Getting Started

To learn more about how Dialog Intranet Toolkit can help you meet the big objective, please contact your account representative, or call 800-326-9103, or visit our Web site at http://www.dialog.com/products for fact sheets, previews, and other information. You can also take advantage of our consulting services. Dialog Corporation consultants are available to assist with the creation of custom sites, or to wholly create custom sites according to client specifications. Additionally, Dialog will also host custom sites for organizations that do not have Intranets.

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