The Search for Meaning: Why 'findability' can help maximize your ECMS investment

The Search for Meaning:Why ‘Findability’ Can Help Maximize Your ECMS Investment2016

OV E R V I E W

Information is the lifeblood of the modern enterprise. CIOs and their teams

have powerful tools for collecting and collating business data, but when

employees and other stakeholders try to extract it there can be a crisis of

meaning. Mountains of data but a struggle to find meaningful information.

In this whitepaper we examine this search for meaning in the enterprise,

and how enhancing findability can add significant value to the investment

an organization makes in important tools like enterprise content

management systems.

01 The Search for Meaning: Why ‘findability’ can help maximize your ECMS investment

The modern enterprise is drowning in data. In a typical organization

information is growing at a rate faster than ever before and while

companies across the world are utilizing enterprise grade content and

record management systems to collect and archive data, it is also becoming

harder to make sense of it and gather critical business intelligence from

unstructured data.

Company intranets and enterprise content and record management

systems are simply becoming huge data dumps with business data going in

but becoming harder and harder to find.

A typical organization now manages terabytes of data and millions of

documents in a variety of formats. Companies operating across markets

have to deal with the added complexity of multiple languages. Gartner

predicts that enterprise data will grow by 800% from 2013 to 2018, a

majority of it in the form of unstructured data (emails, webpages, social

media posts, spreadsheets, word processing documents, presentations and

other file formats).

It is estimated that nearly 80% of enterprise data is unstructured and lives

across multiple repositories in an organisation , and it is more vital now to

have strategies in place that allow companies to mine this data and develop

intelligence on-demand.

1 https://rcpmag.com/articles/2012/10/30/sharepoint-costs-more.aspx

02The Search for Meaning: Why ‘findability’ can help maximize your ECMS investment

Gartner predicts that enterprise data will grow by 800% from 2013 to 2018, a majority of it in the form of unstructured data (emails, webpages, social media posts, spreadsheets, word processing documents, presentations and other file formats).

1DATA EVERYWHERE, BUT NOT A BYTE TO USE?

1

1. 1. The ECMS challenge

Gathering business intelligence is not dependent on processing power

alone.

To be competitive in the marketplace and enable faster decision making

within the organization, companies need to use ‘findability’ tools in

combination with enterprise content management systems (ECMS), such as

SharePoint.

The ability to simply find the information when required, dramatically

improves internal knowledge management (KM) user adoption and helps

better manage business risk.

It is impractical to manage the data an organization creates today and the

speed at which it does so, without the right tools and strategies in place. The

amount of data generated is increasing at a rapid clip, while the budget for

data storage, management and retrieval remains the same.


DATA EVERYWHERE, BUT NOT A BYTE TO USE?

For every dollar spent on license fees for Enterprise Content Management Systems, organisations spend $8 on additional costs.

For many organizations an ECMS is irreplaceable tool, capturing and

managing business data and enabling version and access controls.

However, finding meaning amongst all the information stored in a content

management system is a constant challenge.

Analysts and decisions makers in an organization seek relevant and

contextual information to identify business opportunities and risks, and end

up spending up to half of their time in searching for the right documents.

This lack of ease of using an enterprise content management system and

the difficulty in retrieving information when it is actually needed and the

context in which it is needed, drives user acceptance down and we observe

organizations spending a large portion of their IT budget on ECMSes that

aren’t even used by a majority of the target audience.


DATA EVERYWHERE, BUT NOT A BYTE TO USE?

Findability

The ease with

which information

contained in a

content management

system, a database

or a website can be

found.

Machine Learning

Use of artificial

intelligence

algorithm to learn

natural language

from users and

documents to

present search

results that the user

wants.

Natural Language Processing

Enabling programs

to understand and

process human or

natural language

input.

ECMS Software Licence fees $5.34

Database licence feesServer License feesVM licencesInitial implementationPersonnel costsa. Project Manager, Change Manager, Analystb. System, Database & SharePoint administratorsc. Information Manager & architect d. Records Managere. In-house counself. Trainer

Required sub-projectsa. Information Governance Planningb. Disposal & Retention Planningc. E-Discovery planningd. Roll-out and traininge. Information Architecture planning and executionf. Project Management, Recruitment and HR

Microsoft Partner feeHardware - ServersOngoing annual costsi. System, database & SharePoint administratorsii. Increased storage costs from storage growthiii. Downtime rectificationiv. New sites and users deployed, old sites and users actionedv. Archivingvi. Hardware replacement and annual DR costs

$42.99

Monthly Total Cost of Ownership per employee TCO for 5,000 strong organisation

US$48~US$ 250,000

For every dollar spent on license fees for Enterprise Content

Management Systems, organizations spend $8 on additional costs

(check inset box for costs analysis), accumulating to a quarter of a

million dollars spend each month for a typical organization with 5,000

employees.

Add to that 17% of the typical employee’s time spent searching for

information, and the cost of information access and low user adoption

adds up to ~$13.5m a year for a 5000 strong company.

With that high per head cost of delivering a content management

system, you need to look harder into getting the most return on every

dollar spent.

Here are some of the key issues that keep organizations from

extracting most value out of their ECMS investment.

2 https://rcpmag.com/articles/2012/10/30/sharepoint-costs-more.aspx

3 http://cfour.fishbowlsolutions.com/2010/07/23/calculating-e20-roi-lack-of-information-management-costs-2700-

per-user-per-year/


23 REASONS YOUR ECMS MAY NOTBE DELIVERING SUFFICIENT ROI

TOTAL COSTS OF RUNNING AN ECMS

2

3

2. 1. Relevant results - text vs context

The definition of ‘SEARCH’ – (v.) TO LOOK CAREFULLY IN ORDER TO FIND SOMETHING.

Storing documents would be utterly futile if they weren’t findable. Most

companies investing in an ECMS do not actually derive real search value.

85% of the relevant documents are never even retrieved during search and

91% users abandon their search because they can’t find relevant results in

the first page. There are a number of time-sensitive business requirements

in which simple ‘text based’ searches are simply not enough.

For example, a text search on the term “Security” may return results in a

financial organization’s ECMS that simply contain that word. The search

results may contain documents pertaining to ‘bio security’, ‘data security’

etc. when the user was most probably looking for all the documents on

tradeable financial assets (security).

Likewise, when all a user remembers is a synonym of what they are actually

searching for, it can be frustrating not getting relevant results. A case in

point being a business user in a pharma company searching for something

in a context where a drug has a primary chemical name, multiple brand

names across different regional markets and an active ingredient name and

a symbol.



A context-based findability tool would present such related documents

together, saving the user and the business, time and money.

Similarly, Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) in contact centers and

self-help portals heavily rely on knowledge bases. To minimize the time

spent on service calls and increase user satisfaction, a CSR needs to locate

correct content instantly.

In a simplistic text-based search environment, the CSR would have

to disregard a number of irrelevant search results to focus on useful

information.

In contrast, a ‘findability’ engine would deliver contextual search results

based on pre-categorization, semantics and machine learning, which help

the user find documents they want, instead of focusing on the exact search

words they used. Without a specialist core search component, the business

case for an ECMS is weakened – the business pays for it, yet derives little

value from it.



2. 2. Organizing documents – the need for speed

Whether the demand for rapid data retrieval is placed by regulators,

auditors or M&A requirements, crude text based searches are a recipe for

delays and frustration.

In large enterprises, government departments and other highly regulated

organizations, a lot of senior management’s valuable time is spent filing

away forms and then searching for information as and when it is needed.

Not only does this frustrate managers, delayed or inaccurate strategic

decisions made due to the lack of easily available business information can

lead to lost business opportunities, increased costs and poor long-term

investments.

Imposing a classification regime can mitigate organizational risks arising out

of inaccurate and slow information retrieval.

The international standard in information management – ISP 15489

mentions “The higher the level of accountability and/or public scrutiny,

the greater the need for accuracy and speed in locating individual records.

The greater the risks in the business activity, for example public safety

concerning hazardous chemicals, the greater the need for precision and

control in retrieval”.

step




2. 3. Unclogging the business machine and managing risk – retaining only the data we need

The storage requirements and corresponding costs at organizations

is growing every year, even though only a third of that data stored is

actually relevant and valuable, while the rest of the documents are

perfect candidates for disposal. That is tremendous amount of waste of

budgets that are already under strain to do more with less.

Even when the budgets are increased to keep up with storage demands,

in the absence of retention and disposal policies and tools, organizations

still end up retaining years of old emails about social activities or multiple

versions of the same document, even when there is no justifiable business

cause to hold on to them.

The cost of storing, archiving and backing nearly all data without

discrimination quickly adds up.

In the scenario that the redundant, outdated and trivial documents

are not disposed of, it is imperative to have smart findability tools in

place that will automatically identify documents that contain sensitive

information.


This allows rapid migration of such content to appropriately protected and

managed locations.

A metadata extraction or automatic document tagging tool improves

ECMS searches by creating clearly classified and categorized metadata and

providing relevant search refiners.

Also, a key component of an effective information governance framework

is the application of a defensible deletion policy, which helps to safeguard

information assets, reduce corporate risk while freeing up storage

resources and streamlining workflows. Without a content discovery tool,

it is hard to distinguish which information is important for the organization

and should absolutely not be deleted and emails and other documents that

may not be worth storing and archiving.

A findability tool allows organizations to manage their risk by matching

documents against retention policies, identifying similar and duplicate

documents and an overall better data governance.


…only 30% of the documents in a business are relevant and valuable while the rest are perfect candidates for disposal. Contrast that with storage requirements (and corresponding costs) in typical organisations growing by 45-60% every year.


Using a tool that allows companies to automatically categorize and tag

documents can assist in information retrieval tasks such as e.g. which

documents are legal agreements, or which documents contain information

around operational risk issues.

Such improvements in an ECM environment provide relevant search

refiners (commonly known as filtered search), allowing users to ignore

irrelevant search results by filtering results based on provided categories,

topics and other types of metadata.

Deploying a business classification scheme with a context based search

engine, allows information management teams to categorize content

and consistently make business decisions around document retention

and disposal. This tagging and classification regimen reduces storage and

database licensing costs and aids compliance and data retrieval at the same

time.


3THE FINDABILITY ENGINE AND THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

In an organization’s IT lifecycle, adding a content discovery tool enhances

the value of the entire ECMS investment - when either migrating data to an

ECMS for the first time, or when upgrading an ECMS.

This is when information managers can decide what data needs to be

migrated and enable automatic tagging and metadata creation. This process

can even fix previous mistakes and fill in missing parts in the metadata

schema.

When choosing a data discovery tool that helps extract the most value out

of the ECMS investment, look for one that is a true findability engine and

delivers results for the following business needs:

a. World class findabilityA discovery application that allows users to easily pick out the information

they need and use natural language to perform searches amplifies the value

of an ECMS.

b. Automatic Metadata and machine learningFor a fraction of the cost of an ECMS, a discovery tool should automate

metadata creation for every single document that is created, removing the

dependence on team members to perform this task manually. This will lead

to tagging and metadata consistency across the database.


4ECMS MIGRATION AND UPGRADES – THE IDEAL TIME TO IMPLEMENT BETTER CONTENT DISCOVERY

A findability engine allows pages and documents in a knowledge management system to be automatically tagged by topic, allowing customer service representatives or users themselves to locate relevant content and filter out documents they don’t need.

Evidence of the success of such tools and techniques can be observed in service desk call centres and the reduction in issue resolution and call times because the service representatives can find relevant information faster.

c. To reduce storage requirementsPick a findability engine that will help discover all files on the file shares and

identify redundant, outdated or trivial information, giving the organization

control over what to keep and what to dispose of.

d. Multiple languagesIf your business is spread across multiple countries and has stakeholders

who interact in different languages, it is imperative you pick a tool that does

everything you ask it to do, in the languages your teams speak.

At Pingar, we’ve delivered content discovery solutions to organizations

across large financial services firms, government departments, pharma &

life sciences companies, among others, and seen the amplified value our

clients have derived out of their SharePoint and other enterprise content

management systems.


ECMS MIGRATION AND UPGRADES

You can greatly improve

the quality of the due

diligence effort and cost

savings achieved by pre-

categorizing content.

The Mergers and Acquisitions imperative for Findability

When businesses grow inorganically with mergers and acquisitions (M&A), the deal times involved work to tight time frames to complete due-diligence and post-merger integration.

The speed of organising content for an M&A deal room is often hampered by the lack of pre-categorized content, often depending mostly on finding the right people to just know where to find documents immediately, or relying on basic text searches through a content management system.

You can greatly improve the quality of the due diligence effort and cost savings achieved by pre-categorizing content, which can be retrieved from an ECMS at a moment’s notice.

A specialised discovery application can categorise typical content found in an M&A data room such as financial and tax reports, HR documents, contracts and agreements etc., wherever they reside, without needing to set up specialised systems or directories.


DiscoveryOne from Pingar is a multi-platform content discovery system that supports a variety of enterprise content management systems, including SharePoint, file-shares and more. It is a scalable, enterprise-grade system that can work through tens or hundreds of millions of documents.

It extracts meaning from the natural language contained in massive volumes of documents, emails, and webpages and allows organizations to find the information they need, when they need it.Pingar DiscoveryOne lets enterprises identify opportunities and risks hidden in the text of corporate and web data. It reduces the cost of document storage, security and compliance.

DiscoveryOne’s powerful text analytics engine reads millions of pages in hours identifying what content matters most to analysts and information management professionals. Our solutions will point you to the trends, topics and issues exposed in those documents, posts, articles and emails. Drill down within minutes to the right content out of millions of documents so you can be a step ahead.

Talk to us now to find out how you can get the most out of your ECMS investment.

5ABOUT PINGAR

Learn more

DiscoveryOneTM

DiscoveryOne Content Enrichment is the easiest way to improve search, enable defensible deletion and identify document security risks. By reading, categorizing and tagging documents, DiscoveryOne automatically creates metadata. This metadata can be used in systems such as enterprise search, document management, email and CRM.

CONTENT ENRICHMENT

DiscoveryOne Content Inventory reads file systems to present an overview of what they contain. It identifies documents that are redundant, outdated, trivial, or useful and worth retaining. Usually, a file system contains only 25% of relevant, valuable and useful content, the rest are candidates for disposal.

CONTENT INVENTORY

www.pingar.com | North America +1 408 663 2328 | Asia Pacific +64 9 950 3299 | Europe and Asia +91 80 4212 7047 | [email protected]

Learn more

http://pingar.com/content-enrichment/

http://pingar.com/content-inventory/

Data & Analytics

The Search for Meaning: Why 'findability' can help maximize your ECMS investment