Improving Findability Inside the Firewall

Improving Findability
Behind the Firewall
Bob Boeri
bboeri@guident.com

Guident - 198 Van Buren Street, Suite 120 Herndon, VA 20170 - Tel: 703.326.0888, www.guident.com
Copyright © 2010 Guident - All rights reserved 1

Agenda

• Findability – What is it? Why is it so hard?

• Approach to improving findability

• Findability Project Stages

• Summary – Findability Checklist


Findability – What is it?

• The art and science of locating information in or about an electronic document.

• Entails organizing and searching content, semantics, and interface design.

• Optimizes both recall and precision – getting everything that matches your query
versus only the one or two items you’re looking for.

• We spend up to 20% of each workday trying to find document information.

• We want to FIND, not SEARCH.

‘I know what “it” means well enough, when I find a
thing,’ said the Duck…The question is, what did the
archbishop find?’

Some Elements of Findability

Clustering Controlled Data
Vocabularies Dictionaries
Entity Extraction Semantic Search Tagging
Taxonomies Text Analytics Thesaurus

Notice the “right brain” – verbal, language– aspects of
Findability:
“The Art and Science of Making Content Easy to Find”

Ultimately people want to find, not search


Involves Content, Processes, and
People
• Documents are becoming inherently social, so finding and leveraging
document information requires a broad strategy, not just “selecting and
installing the best search engine.”
• Enhancing findability requires considering all three gears to drive a unified
information access strategy
• With a comprehensive approach to the findability lifecycle

Document
Spectrum


What is a Document?

• What is a document? A file you can perceive with one or more senses.

• ISO 15489: "Recorded information or object which can be treated as a unit.“

• Record: “Information created, received, and
– maintained as evidence …legal obligations
– or transactions of business

• Documents constitutes 80% of our business knowledge assets. Databases
etc. the other 20%.


Findability – Why Is It So Hard?

• FORMATS: Hundreds of formats, versions, fonts, character sets… across the
structure spectrum.

• PLACES: Dozens to thousands of file shares, ECM repositories,
desktops, email systems, databases, intranet…

• QUANTITY: Information and file counts doubling at least yearly.
Google indexed 1 trillion web pages in 2008. Quantities of multi-terabyte and
even multi-petabyte are increasingly common inside the firewall.

• LANGUAGE: Inherently subtle, inconsistent names, dates...

• RIGHTS: Managing security is difficult since systems define rights differently
and repository administers tend to over-protect information. If you don’t have rights
you can’t find content.

• PROCESSES and PEOPLE: So many tools, so little oversight. Governance.
Kilobytes > Megabytes > Gigabytes > Petabytes > Exabytes

Findability Project Success: Keys and
Shortcuts

Keys: Approach findability projects holistically.

Business process and culture analysis (right-brain)

PLUS

Full project lifecycle best practices (left-brain)

Are there shortcuts?
When Ptolemy, Alexander the Great’s powerful Greek
general asked Euclid for the shortcut to learning
Geometry, Euclid replied
“There is no royal road to Geometry.”

There is no shortcut to findability either.


Findability Enhancements Lifecycle

Design
Functional and
Technical
Requirements
Taxonomy and
Metadata

Analyze Enterprise Rights
Build
Management
Pain Points – Change
Performance -
Initiate Current State – Management
Future State Speed
System
Objectives
80-20: Who Governance Plan
Scope – HW / SW Searches? Why?
Requirements? Test the System
Stakeholders - Technology
Allies Survey Test the
Deliver Taxonomy
Sponsor Strategy – Tactics
“To Be” Model Monitor - Govern

Taxonomies Continuous
Improvement
Train

Evangelize

Initiate

Initiate Analyze Design Build Deliver

• Who is the sponsor? Who are the stakeholders? Who will be helped
by the project? Who might object?
• Scope:
– Fixing a current problem in one repository? Integrating islands of information?
– Anticipate trends such as Web 2.0 (blogs, wikis, social tagging…)
– What will be searched and where does it reside?
– Will you augment or upgrade what you have today, or will you replace, your
current search facility?
– Is the findability problem a training issue? Training and follow-up are always
required.
– Is there a tactical quick win consistent with strategic goals?

“80% of organizational information is unstructured and 90% of this remains
unmanaged. Unmanaged information is growing at roughly 36% annually.” AIIM,
The New ECM Trifecta, September 17, 2009.

Initiate


• Are there allies whom the sponsor might not know? Librarians,
taxonomists, records managers, ECM users, Technical Writers,
Attorneys (eDiscovery issues), Business Analysts …
• What are the goals and objectives? Business or Technical? Lower
costs? Reacting to a lawsuit? Identifying critical business continuity
documents?
• Green issues can include cost savings. Gartner recently said that
environmental and social responsibility will exceed compliance as a
corporate priority.
• How will you know you’ve succeeded?
“The average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year and wastes about
1,410 of these pages. With the average cost of each wasted page being about six cents, a
company with 500 employees could be spending $42,000 per year on wasted prints. AIIM
Eight Reasons You Need a Strategy for Managing Information, October 2009.


Analyze


• Business Requirements?
– What do stakeholders say? How about squeaky wheels?
– 80/20 rule: What must be done?
– What is the vision for the future state? If none, develop it.
• Who may rely on the same information and should be part of team
or at least consulted?
• Think big, but act small initially. If you can’t consolidate search
systems, target them as future parts of the federation.
• Manage expectations: performance, precision, recall.

Rita Knox, Gartner analyst. “Search and taxonomy technology is pretty good
now. In fact, we're seeing taxonomy and search come together where
companies can even slant it toward certain results (to fit their needs and
industries).”

Analyze


• Align with architecture standards if available. If you can’t include all,
at least have a bridge or cooperative strategy.
• How does new content become available? Are the processes
managed?
– If searching in a content management system, can users put content in the
wrong folder?
– Search every version of every document? Major versions only?
• Critical Success Factors? What are the pain points?
• Green Connection? Demands on Storage, Data Centers, Backup
and Recovery.


Analyze


• Content - Perform Information Audit and Assessment:
– Where is the content to be searched: Managed Content Repositories, Email,
Shared Drives, Desktops…
– What kind of content is to be found? See formats earlier
– XML content and DTDs/Schemas?
– How much content is there, and how fast does it grow?
– Which content is most important to find? 80/20 rule.
– Bundled objects and Zip files.
– When: How often and when is it searched?
– The perils of paper and OCR.
• Tools in place:
– What search engines are already in place? (There always are some, often
many.)
– Taxonomy management tools other than Excel and Mind Manager or FreeMind?


Analyze


• Are there allies whom the sponsor might not know? Librarians,
taxonomists, records managers, ECM users…
• Performance: How quickly to index and find new content?
• What taxonomies or metadata currently exist:
– They exist … maybe implicitly or by other names … site maps, for example.
– Folder structures in ECMs
– Metadata
– Managed vocabularies, such as thesauruses and value lists
– Tools other than Excel to manage them?
• Who if anybody is in charge of information governance?
• Only after thorough analysis, perform a thorough vendor search.
• Vendor maturity and Quadrants – Hype Cycles


Analyze


• Search isn’t homogeneous, and all vendors are not alike.
• Usually no single best vendor choice.
– Market share
– Support
– Maturity
– Ability to Execute
– Completeness of Vision
– Related products (Document management always comes with search, usually
OEM-edition).
• Vendors buy Competitive products
– Verity  Autonomy
– Convera  Fast  Microsoft


Design


• Taxonomy design approaches
– Avoid business organizational (changes, hard to work with cross-organizational
content)
– Consider a process approach: What business processes produce documents?
• Metadata design approaches:
– Balancing act: How much is enough?
– Discover what’s wanted, then urge pruning
– “Normalize” the various sources you’ll be searching.

“ideal person to be responsible for ERM implementation is someone who oversees
both security technology and information access policies; or, failing that, an
organization where the executives in charge of each of those areas work closely
together.” Enterprise Rights Management, Gilbane Group, August 2008


Design


• Search Federation / Integration
– One Über-search system? Simple and Advanced user interfaces? Simplicity is
key.
– One-stop searching to display results from other search engines?
– Prioritize repositories for indexing?
• Delivery devices:
– PC and laptop screens
– Phones and PDAs?
– Designing style sheets for each type of content (see earlier document spectrum)
to each kind of device
“Our research found that multiple search engines are the norm in most
organizations… separate search solutions for e-mail, Web content, wikis, Blogs, ERP
systems, CRM systems, intranets, File shares (leading) to user frustration with
enterprise search.”
AIIM, MarketIQ Intelligence Quarterly Q2 2008 “Findability - The Art and Science of
Making Content Easy to Find”

Design


• Index design
– Full index versus incremental index
– When – “on the fly” for everything? End of day or end of week?

• Balancing privacy and security
– Allow me to see at least names or metadata of files whose content I cannot
view? Allows me to contact author to learn more.
– Hide all results I shouldn’t see; no option for me to learn more.

“Try saying ‘IT owns search’ at your next company meeting, and watch the
phone lines to HR light up…they’ll raise holy hell at the concept of IT
indexing their email or web activity.”

“IT versus Organizational Paranoia,” Information Week, November 9, 2009


Build


• Test the Search System – but also test its supporting components
• Testing the taxonomy:
– Balance your resources and your scope
– Scope: Who, what, when, how?
– Expect to revise the taxonomy.
• Taxonomy Testing Tradeoffs:
– Scope
• Whole taxonomy, every node? Costly and time consuming.
• The “hardest” branches? Says who?
– Sampling techniques – how many and which documents to test and which
branches?
– Participants –
• Those who are familiar with the taxonomy: May not learn as much. They’ve already drunk the Koolaid.
• Those unfamiliar with the taxonomy: Learn more, need more upfront training and time.


Taxonomy Testing Practices


• Testing is critical to assuring that the taxonomy meets design
objectives and supports general taxonomy metrics (such as breadth
and coverage).
• The primary objective of “folder” taxonomies: provide an intuitive
structure into which documents will be stored consistently and
through which users can navigate to find needed content.
• Who manages the taxonomy definitions?
• Iterations of the testing are normal; like Clinical Trials, testing
“evolves” as more is learned in different phases. This includes
testing after deployment (like Phase IV).
• Unlike clinical trials, most people have very limited time to test.


Why Test Taxonomies?


• Because no structure is perfect, and initial taxonomies
are just that: Version 1.
• You want the best practicable solution to build on.
• You want to be sure that there is a place –ideally only
one place – for every document to be stored.
• You want the taxonomy to be as intuitive and easy to
understand as practicable.


Testing Tradeoffs


• Taxonomy scope, options include:
– Test all bottom branches: Tests everything, takes longer.
– Test only the challenging branches: Doesn’t test everything, may take
less time.
– Hybrid: A good sample test with some pre-selected documents and
some volunteered by the testers.

• Types of testers:
– Involve current project participants: Understand the taxonomy,
expedited training, participant biases may reduce what we learn.
– New project participants: Training and testing takes significantly longer,
may provide more and more useful results.
– Hybrid: Use a mix of current project team and new testers.


Testing Tradeoffs


• Testing Group Sizes, options include:
– Large group tests are easier to schedule but provide low quality test
results.
– One-on-one testing provides highest quality test results but takes the
most time to complete.
– Small Groups
• Test Documents and Sources options:
– Using documents named in taxonomy discovery meetings is easier but
self-fulfilling; not a fair test.
– Preselecting documents from records schedules gets the process
started and uses existing definitions but may not be representative of
the final mix.


Deliver – Install and Walk Away?


• Ongoing outreach to users
• Ongoing Auditing and Governance

Information Systems Governance:
…a subset discipline of Corporate Governance focused
on Information Technology (IT) systems and their
performance and risk management.
IT governance implies a system in which all stakeholders,
including the board, internal customers, and in particular
departments such as finance, have the necessary input
into the decision making process.
Wikipedia, “Information Technology Governance.”


Deliver – Install and Walk Away?


• Thinking about governance should start as soon as the findability project
begins.
• Keep the governance simple
• Involve all high-level stakeholders
• Plan for change in the governance model as findability itself evolves.


In Summary

• Andy Grove was right: Only the Paranoid Survive and get to deliver findability
results successfully.
• Use both the left (analytical) and right (creative) sides of your brain, and make
sure your team has both sufficient technical and political skills, throughout the
full lifecycle of your findability projects.
• And don’t forget that findability projects never end, they just change their
phases.


About Guident

http://guident.com
• Professional Services and Consulting Firm: Business Intelligence,
Management Consulting, Systems Engineering, ECM and Search
• Founded in 1996, headquartered in the Washington, DC Metro area
• Over 260 professionals with broad expertise and backgrounds
• Named to Inc. Magazine’s Inc. 5000 list in 2007, 2008, and 2009
• Washington Technology Fast 50 member in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009
• Washington Business Journal Fastest Growing Company in 2008

Email Bob Boeri bboeri@guident.com
for Findability Checklist and Presentation Quotes tool


Improving Findability Inside the Firewall

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