Has the ROT Settled Into Your Organization?
Organizations create and capture information in order to use it as part of business processes, to collaborate, to inform. Seems simple, doesn’t it? Yet while information can be captured easily, finding that information once it has been created seems to be a constant and frustrating problem. Even with today’s enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, users simply can’t find what they need.
Part of the issue is the sheer volume and variety of the information we hold. However, much of what we hold, around “85% of Stored Data Is Either Dark or Redundant, Obsolete, or Trivial (ROT).”1
Add to this exponential growth, a poor search experience (redundant results, poorly described content) and you can understand why employees spend an average of “1.8 hours every day ... searching and gathering information.”2
“I can’t find what I need quickly,” “I get tired of looking for information so I just create a new document from scratch,” and “I can save the document ok, but I can never find it again, it’s like it disappears into a black hole” are all common complaints of today’s ECM solutions.
This seems to be counter intuitive; after all—ECM systems should deliver huge amounts of functionality to allow users to store and retrieve information easily. So what is going wrong?
The Problem:
The core problem for most users is a simple one—it takes more effort to store information in your new system than on their shared drive. Users have to add extra information manually; what type of document it is, what client it is related to, whether it holds personally identifiable information, etc. … and they simply aren’t doing it. Yes, the information is important, for findability, for management, for business process, and yes, for compliance. The question though is why in 2016 do we still expect a user to do this manually?
The Opportunity:
Allowing your solution to work for you resolves these pain points in a systematic and fully auditable manner. By automatically enriching your content as it is captured in your system, the valuable metadata we need is automatically applied with no additional overhead on users—their job is to simply create it in the system. The system’s job is to understand and enrich the content as it is received.
Commonwealth Bank Australia is the 14th largest bank in the world.3 Using Pingar’s Content Enrichment solution, they now automatically tag and enrich content when it is created, extracting entities such as people, organizations, locations, account numbers,
personal identifiable information, and many other keywords with no overhead on the user.
This information is then made available in the search interface to allow users to find information faster and easier. It also helps users understand what the content is that they are looking at. For example, the automatic flagging of a document as holding personally identifiable information can give users a cautionary note to enable systematic compliance with privacy regulations.
This automated enrichment process has significantly increased satisfaction with the internal search solution and saved much needed time in dealing with both internal and external customer queries as information can be found significantly faster.
When organizations understand their content, staff can make sensible and evidence-based decisions that truly add value. These range from knowing what to migrate and what to delete, being able to automatically create relationships between content so staff are always looking at ‘the complete picture,’ and improving the customer experience by automatically sending information to a supervisor when the sentiment is read as an unhappy customer … the opportunities are endless.
But none of that is achievable without the right tools. Almost 20 years ago, an article from Knowledge World in May 19984 spoke to the opportunities in maturing information retrieval solutions. The tools have improved enormously, and in this era, Pingar is a leader with its DiscoveryOne suite of solutions.
Pingar has developed solutions to enhance existing ECM systems, adding the valuable intelligence layer that makes content useful to myriad business outcomes. Pingar solutions provide:
- Enriched Content; adding value to enable business processes to be automated
- Intelligent Inventory; being able to assess the quantity and quality of the content residing in your file system allows you to make sensible decisions in project migrations, disposal schedules, etc.
- Intelligent Content; automatically extracting value from the content captured, this allows relationships, topics, and sentiments in content to be identified—all of which allow the correct information to be found faster. ?
If you are interested in knowing more, please visit www.pingar.com.
Endnotes
1 https://www.veritas.com/news-releases/2016-03-15-veritas-global-databerg-report-finds-85-percent-of-stored-data.html
2 http://utrconf.com/top-3-reasons-why-we-spend-so-much-time-searching-for-information/
3 http://www.forbes.com/sites/liyanchen/2015/05/06/2015-global-2000-the-worlds-largest-banks/#40ff2fd724f1
4 http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Features/The-role-of-information-retrieval-in-knowledge-management-8964.aspx