Confessions of a Corporate User

Scopus Is Key Element of QinetiQ's New Enterprise Portal
Integration of Scopus facilitates access to key research for staff, says Miles Porter, Information Engineer, QinetiQ

Miles Porter

QinetiQ is a leading international defense and security technology company with over 13,500 employees. They develop innovative technology-based solutions and products and provide technology-rich support services for major government organizations, such as the UK MOD and the US DoD and for commercial customers around the world.

The new QinetiQ Enterprise Portal – based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – is a central repository for information and collaboration that QinetiQ's technical and business teams can access from anywhere in the organization, helping them to develop business in new and existing markets.

A key element of the new Enterprise Portal is the Enterprise Search, which spans internal and subscribed external information sources, including Scopus. This allows staff to perform a single search across multiple resources with all results collated in a single interface on the corporate intranet. In the month after the Enterprise Portal's launch "employees performed 40,000 searches, with 4,000 of those by unique staff members", reported Lewis Doyle, Director of Managed Services and Group Chief Information Officer. The inclusion of Scopus in the Enterprise Search, and the integration of a link resolver, has also resulted in a large increase in the number of full-text downloads by end-users.

The launch of the Enterprise Portal has enabled QinetiQ to close most of its physical Libraries, providing more funding for electronic resources and freeing its Information Specialists, working as part of the group called insight Team, to more proactively support technical and business developments. One of these roles is helping develop the new collaborative Communities within the Enterprise Portal.

In support of these Communities, the insight Team is using Scopus to provide regular alerts on articles of relevance to each Community, which are added to an InfoWatch Blog. According to Peter Hutton, Head of the insight Team, “This means that targeted information is distributed far more widely in the organisation, rather than just to individuals, helping to increase its effectiveness across QinetiQ".

Miles Porter, Information Engineer, QinetiQ says that "Scopus is QinetiQ's principal Scientific, Technical, Engineering and Medical (STEM) citation database, and a key component of the Enterprise Portal. The integration of Scopus was helped by the standard of the API documentation and the designers and developers of the Scopus web service should be commended"