Records Management and the Role for Enterprise Search
should a regulatory request arise. So, an organization with the right records management policies in place is able to search its records management repositories for all content relevant to requests, significantly reducing the amount of time, energy and money spent on responding to regulatory requests and audits.
From the systems perspective, an enterprise search system and an electronic records management system complement each other—or at least they should do so. In fact, almost all electronic records management systems include a search engine to supplement other forms of information access and retrieval. The role of the search engine is to assist in the retrieval of all records related to a particular function, activity or context, and guarantee secure access to and delivery of information by providing end-to-end security. Enterprise search is about going across all those information silos included in records management systems, as well as documents that fall outside of those systems.
On this front, many organizations rely on technology called "federated search." Federation is the process of taking a search query, translating it, and sending it to multiple data sources, such as other search engines (which are built into records management systems) and various other internal and external data sources, from which users receive results. Federated searching improves the accuracy and relevance of individual searches and significantly reduces the amount of time required to search for information in and outside of records management systems.
Enterprise Search Helps Manage Corporate Exposure
Both public and private companies are experiencing a period of heightened regulatory control through legislation both in the United States and globally. This scrutiny is occurring in a number of areas, including marketing practices, government reporting, privacy protection, recruitment practices, risk management practices and quality control activities around manufacturing operations in sectors like pharmaceuticals and food processing. Some recent highly visible investigations and aggressive prosecutions have resulted in significant financial judgments and criminal convictions.
These trends are driving a powerful reaction among organizations to put in place robust enterprisewide compliance management programs designed to mitigate risk, enhance management controls and ensure regulatory compliance. Application systems for managing regulatory compliance are increasingly the #1 investment priority for enterprise IT development. The costs for non-compliance can be substantial.
Enterprise search enables effective regulatory compliance by providing a comprehensive platform for information access, analysis and control. A host of actionable search-enabled capabilities, including real-time or near real-time monitoring and tracking of equity transactions, sales and expense data, customer notifications, emails, records management repositories and just about any information across the organization, can be incorporated.
The regulatory compliance solution built on search can easily monitor and look for internal corporate or regulatory violations, including non-disclosure violations, illegal content like pornography, insider information disclosure, illegal employee actions, misuse of company assets or almost any policy that can be monitored and tracked through access to corporate or external information. In addition, violations can be identified, documented and escalated for immediate resolution.
Advanced linguistic analytics and entity extraction capabilities as part of modern enterprise search systems enable organizations to systematically screen, identify and interpret information and reduce the complexity to develop a sound and thorough intelligence picture that accurately guides effective actions. Enterprise search systems are able to filter information on-demand, and can automatically deliver content-driven alerts to foster better and more comprehensive intelligence faster.
The Bottom Line
Litigation, existing and emerging regulations, compliance audits and internal investigation are forcing organizations to locate and produce all relevant electronically stored information as part of what is becoming a critical and increasingly broad information discovery process. In the past, the failure to produce this information has led to significant fines, and some of the emerging regulations promise to be even more punitive in this respect.
Enterprise search plays a pivotal role not only in enabling true information discovery, but also in helping organizations mitigate litigation risk. Leveraging well-designed, innovative information discovery, business intelligence and information tracking and monitoring solutions built on search can help mitigate the substantial risks that face today’s companies and government institutions. For organizations, the key thing is to understand how the discovery processes work, the pitfalls they may encounter and the best practices to make information retention practices truly discoverable.