More to Intelligent Search than Meets the Eye
According to the Association of Information and Image Management (AIIM), search is the art and science of making content easy to find. It seems like a simple request: make content findable. Unfortunately, for enterprises dealing with massive and growing volumes of content, it is almost never that easy.
With an industry critically concerned about managing unstructured content more effectively, reining in capital expenditures, and driving information governance programs forward, it has become vitally important to look beyond contracting multiple vendors and tools to solve complex content challenges and address the REAL problem. Spending many years working with customers trying to catch the elusive solution for superior searchability, we’ve gathered a few key findings.
1. Search is Not About Search. It’s About Findability.
What is Enterprise Search? According to AIIM, it is “the practice of identifying and enabling specific content across the enterprise to be indexed, searched and displayed to authorized users.” While this definition rings true, it is arguably only halfway there. It’s important to take a step back and consider why the topic of search is so critical. What are the end goals? Content usability, collaboration, compliance, eDiscovery, and other business drivers. Search that begins with classification can easily feed other analytics tools and workflows in a faster, more efficient approach. Findability of content that matters ensures business value for the entire enterprise. When organizations think of search in terms of findability—as in guiding people to information to meet business drivers—they begin to see immediate benefits because it involves a multifaceted approach. One can find information through an overly complex algorithm, but also through classification tools, and other platforms. There becomes more than one way to get to the heart of the content.
2. Improving Search Methods is Not the Answer; Improving Content Processing Is.
In a recent poll with Information Governance executives on the biggest challenges they face around search, 41% of them said content processing was the main roadblock. In our years of experience working with Fortune 500 customers in highly regulated industries who have millions upon millions of documents, we find the biggest area of focus to be content processing as well. This is what every organization wants to improve, because they know it will help them to enable a number of business processes, from claims management to creating submissions-ready content. What we have seen is that improving search, ironically, is not about improving search at all. It’s about improving content processing. Creating the perfect algorithm is a nice dream, but most organizations simply don’t have these resources, or the kind of metadata and user feedback that would be required.
Instead, organizations can focus on processes such as cleaning up ROT content, de-duplicating files, classifying against multiple taxonomies, mapping content, making documents searchable with OCR, extracting useful information from documents automatically to eliminate dependence on the source document—the list goes on. These are the keys to true search success.
3. Any Search Solution Must Begin with the Underlying Content.
A complex algorithm or intelligent content process will not make things more easily findable on their own. Instead, organizations have to start with the content itself—the very document they will eventually need to find. Consider the benefits of having full visibility and understanding of content, leading to greater control and the ability to meet enterprise-wide Information Governance objectives. What is it worth to you? And more importantly, how will you get there?
By standardizing content on the high-definition PDF format and applying advanced OCR, organizations will have better visibility into their files, and will be able to open and read any document on any device at any time. In a recent customer project we found, for example, standardizing their content increased their OCR accuracy from ~82% to >99%. You can imagine the implications of having accurate OCR results.
Analyzing the content enables the elimination of ROT (redundant, obsolete, trivial) content for a much smaller and manageable search field. A recent Canadian study showed that 23% of data is ROT. In terms of categorization, by putting similar content into groupings or buckets, organizations can reduce the dependence on end-user metadata tagging which is often rife with errors. Finally, optimizing content is paramount to search—this includes a classification approach that learns as it grows, enabling organizations to find their content faster. By involving these multifaceted content-focused approaches in their search methodology, organizations can truly increase the findability of their content.
Customers in industries ranging from Life Sciences to Energy to Banking and Insurance are making an impact on technology innovation by bringing to light the challenges they face every day: compliance, migration, digitization, managing the sheer volume of digital content created daily. Being able to intelligently search for content brings unparalleled benefits to an organization, and helps them meet their business objectives faster and more effectively. By concentrating on the findability of the information, focusing on content processing, and preparing content with search in mind, organizations will be able to realize immediate value from their unstructured content.
With its sophisticated Content Elevation Process™, Adlib is transforming the way organizations around the world in Energy, Life Sciences, Insurance, and Banking overcome Information Governance challenges. Integrating with key business tools, Adlib’s solutions enable improved migration, compliance, privacy and security, digital transformation, and classification. By unlocking the value in unstructured content, we empower our customers to derive greater business insight for critical decision-making.