Infuse SharePoint with Content Intelligence
Living in the information age is a mixed blessing for most of us. In our consumer lives, we have more information at our fingertips than ever. But in our work lives, where we are also expected to have unprecedented access to enterprise information, finding this content, navigating it and organizing it is often the bane of our workday existence—and a huge drain on time and resources.
The reality is that managing the tremendous volume of documents every organization produces in its day-to-day operations has become one of the biggest challenges those charged with enterprise knowledge management face. While Microsoft SharePoint provides a solid foundation for the organization, navigation and search of enterprise information, it falls short of delivering a complete information management solution-especially when it comes to the control and "findability" of unstructured content.
The Need for Content Intelligence
A series of independent studies commissioned by Smartlogic and carried out by MindMetre Research last year demonstrated that, while SharePoint is emerging as an industry standard for enterprise content management, there remains disenchantment among managers and directors over the limitations they face in managing and accessing unstructured information.
A 2011 report, entitled "Mind the Search Gap," showed that 52% of 2,000 directors and managers surveyed in the US, UK, Germany and France said they could not find information they needed using their organization's enterprise search facility within what most defined as an acceptable amount of time. A later report, "Lost in the Machine," revealed 67% of senior managers in the same countries said finding information in their organization other than key financial or sales data was "very difficult." That survey also exposed poor meta-tagging of documents as the root problem, with 61% of respondents saying the vast majority of Word files, PDFs and Web content in organizations such as theirs are never properly categorized for accurate and rapid retrieval.
In practical terms, this means that when, say, "Jane in marketing" produces and stores a report with research on a particular customer segment-one that might also be useful for the CRM department, or product development or another division—it can be difficult for others to find it. From other users' perspective it becomes a needle in a stack of needles; for, on upload to SharePoint, Jane processes her documents manually and has no mechanism for applying consistent rules for describing (or tagging) what each is about. As a result, Jane doesn't know quite how to distribute the report, or where to store it, or how long it should be kept, or how it should be tagged. And everyone in Jane's global organization has taken the same haphazard approach to saving their work for years—leaving tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of documents impossible to find.
What organizations such as Jane's need in order to deal with this knowledge management challenge is to endow SharePoint with content intelligence: the capability to access, describe and control unstructured enterprise information. Content intelligence allows a company, a government agency or an independent institution to turn unstructured content into actionable information by augmenting SharePoint with semantic capabilities, which provides a connective layer of context, authority and metadata between the stored content and the enterprise search engines (often FAST or SharePoint Search) employed by the organization.
Applying Content Intelligence
As a Content Intelligence solution, Smartlogic's Semaphore uses semantic software and structures such as an ontology (a vocabulary of business terms and synonyms that captures the relationships between documents, reference sources, identified experts and other connections) to drive the consistent application of rich metadata for search and information governance. That means the handling of enterprise content is systemized, eliminating inconstancies, biases and errors.
Users within organizations that use SharePoint can now identify, classify, extract, analyze and use hard-to-find documents. Content Intelligence endows SharePoint with the capacity to address searchers' intent and the contextual meaning of terms by exposing the ontology as an information discovery aid-which in turn allows users to more easily navigate large stocks of information and pinpoint documents more quickly and precisely.
Content Intelligence solutions (such as Semaphore) also enable the automatic generation of metadata using the ontology. This makes it possible to tag all documents within massive archives that may have languished with little or no tagging for years-at a fraction of what it would cost to manually label the content. All documents are scanned to determine their subject and context, and they can then be tagged with accurate, standardized and consistent metadata that allows them to be recovered and managed.
Employing a Content Intelligence solution prevents the inefficient repetition of work, missed commercial opportunities through lack of information sharing, inability to monetize information and insights the organization already owns, and an increased risk of regulatory non-compliance. And since it can be implemented alongside SharePoint there's no need for a costly "rip and replace" program.
By infusing SharePoint with Content Intelligence, you enhance enterprise search, drive business workflow, ensure the consistent application of metadata, and enable contextual navigation of valuable information assets. At a time when many organizations are struggling with information overload, information governance issues, the limits of existing information management systems, and an increasing pressure to monetize and repurpose information, implementing Content Intelligence is the smart move.