Filling The Gaps: Using Vital Classification and Search for SharePoint

We live in the information age when, in theory, millions of documents sit at our fingertips and are only a search away. In our personal lives, where "to Google" has become a common verb, this is certainly true—but in our professional lives, access to enterprise information is far less certain.

Any large organization builds up a huge amount of information, most of it as unstructured content, each week—and many have archives going back years or even decades. All this information could be used to provide background for proposals and projects, to inform business relationships, to enable collaboration, to avoid repetition of research, to repurpose content and generally to streamline the flow of enterprise knowledge and avoid replication of work already done.

At a time when organizations across the globe face continued economic uncertainty, improving returns on investment by better leveraging information assets is essential. The big challenge for the vast majority of enterprises is harnessing the information they have available and making it findable for the staff, partners, clients, investors, regulators and other stakeholders. The trouble is, sharing information and collaborating on projects is not always as simple as it first seems.

Increasingly, the gateway to the mass store of enterprise information is Microsoft SharePoint. According to Microsoft, 78% of Fortune 500 companies use the software in some capacity, with a total of more than 100 million users having access to SharePoint. Indeed, a new study commissioned by Smartlogic and carried out by MindMetre Research shows that SharePoint is fast being adopted as the information management platform of choice, with the survey of more than 500 organizations in the US and Europe revealing that more than half already use it.

But SharePoint is far from perfect, and recent research by Gartner indicates the Microsoft platform has significant functional gaps. Gartner specifies "taxonomy/classification" as one of six of the areas where the platform is deficient, with clients pointing to "the lack of a more granular or more complex taxonomy and the inability to reflect such structures in SharePoint." Among the particular deficiencies flagged up in the Gartner report are problems with the "mass-tagging of content and ingestion of existing content" and the "management of taxonomies and structures."

The MindMetre study further demonstrates that there is a knock-on effect of these functional gaps: most of the information professionals who responded identify the efficacy of search as a major problem with SharePoint. Altogether, 80% of SharePoint users say their enterprise search facility is falling short of their and their colleagues' original expectations, with 34% saying that the platform is failing in this regard by a considerable margin. Indeed, 78% of SharePoint users are disappointed with the platform's ability to deliver satisfactory access to internal information. This, in turn, is leading to dissatisfaction with return on investment in SharePoint, with 62% reporting a degree of disillusionment with the ROI that the platform has delivered, due to the fact that some important content is still difficult to find and search results are not sufficiently relevant.

As a result of its deficiencies, SharePoint is falling short in achieving what many users see as one of its primary objectives: eliminating the possibility of work duplication, ranked by more than three quarters of those surveyed by MindMetre as their number-one priority. Records management, cited by Gartner as another SharePoint gap, is also a key function affected by enterprises' inability to effectively organize or search information.

Much of the reason for this underperformance can be attributed to reliance on manual tagging by different people, departments, divisions and offices, often using their own unique systems for labeling documents. Not only is physical tagging labor-intensive, the result is often poor quality metadata that is inconsistent and riddled with errors—if it has been applied at all. As it stands, SharePoint relies on manual tagging of metadata to make documents accessible by internal or external search engines. What's more, with conventional search, a term or combination of terms could have numerous different meanings, leaving the user with thousands, even millions, of results to wade through.

This state of affairs often makes it near to impossible to find necessary information. However, there are solutions—such as Smartlogic's Semaphore application—that can be implemented alongside SharePoint to infuse it with "content intelligence," which imbues the platform with the capability to access, describe and control unstructured enterprise information.

For most organizations, enabling content intelligence can be vital to ensuring "findability." Content intelligence enhances a system such as SharePoint with auto-classification, text analytics and visualization capabilities, which enable the platform to deliver a user experience that addresses searchers' intent so that extraneous documents can be filtered out during the "find" process and relevant content that might normally fall outside the search parameters can be included.

Content intelligence provides an automated metadata classification process. Such software can read documents, put them into context, and accurately tag each with the correct metadata. Information can also be cross-referenced and different information streams mapped together to ensure unstructured content integration. To ensure that this is an ongoing capability, the system's functionality needs to include taxonomy and ontology management, automatic classification, text analysis, contextual navigation, information visualization, semantic search enhancement and metadata management.

The results can be impressive. When the investment banking arm of the Royal Bank of Scotland (formerly ABN AMRO) sought to boost the efficiency of its Business Information Services team, it implemented Smartlogic's solution alongside SharePoint. The outcome: it reduced the waiting time for investment bankers searching for information by 60,000 hours by cutting response times from three hours to just minutes; it freed up 40% of the research team's time by vastly speeding up routine gather-and-collate research requests; and it stimulated a 30% increase in requests for value-added information analysis. This was all achieved just by filling a critical SharePoint gap.