The Search for Meaning: Why 'findability' can help maximize your ECMS investment

The Search for Meaning:
Why ‘Findability’ Can Help
Maximize Your ECMS Investment
2016

OVERVIEW
Information is the lifeblood of the modern enterprise. CIOs and their teams
have powerful tools for collecting and collating business data, but when
employees and other stakeholders try to extract it there can be a crisis of
meaning. Mountains of data but a struggle to find meaningful information.
In this whitepaper we examine this search for meaning in the enterprise,
and how enhancing findability can add significant value to the investment
an organization makes in important tools like enterprise content
management systems.
01
The Search for Meaning: Why ‘findability’ can help maximize your ECMS investment

The modern enterprise is drowning in data. In a typical organization
information is growing at a rate faster than ever before and while
companies across the world are utilizing enterprise grade content and
record management systems to collect and archive data, it is also becoming
harder to make sense of it and gather critical business intelligence from
unstructured data.
Company intranets and enterprise content and record management
systems are simply becoming huge data dumps with business data going in
but becoming harder and harder to find.
A typical organization now manages terabytes of data and millions of
documents in a variety of formats. Companies operating across markets
have to deal with the added complexity of multiple languages. Gartner
predicts that enterprise data will grow by 800% from 2013 to 2018, a
majority of it in the form of unstructured data (emails, webpages, social
media posts, spreadsheets, word processing documents, presentations and
other file formats).
It is estimated that nearly 80% of enterprise data is unstructured and lives
across multiple repositories in an organisation , and it is more vital now to
have strategies in place that allow companies to mine this data and develop
intelligence on-demand.
1 https://rcpmag.com/articles/2012/10/30/sharepoint-costs-more.aspx
02
Gartner predicts that
enterprise data will grow
by 800% from 2013 to
2018, a majority of it in the
form of unstructured data
(emails, webpages, social
media posts, spreadsheets,
word processing documents,
presentations and other file
formats).
1DATA EVERYWHERE,
BUT NOT A BYTE TO USE?
1

1. 1. The ECMS challenge
Gathering business intelligence is not dependent on processing power
alone.
To be competitive in the marketplace and enable faster decision making
within the organization, companies need to use ‘findability’ tools in
combination with enterprise content management systems (ECMS), such as
SharePoint.
The ability to simply find the information when required, dramatically
improves internal knowledge management (KM) user adoption and helps
better manage business risk.
It is impractical to manage the data an organization creates today and the
speed at which it does so, without the right tools and strategies in place. The
amount of data generated is increasing at a rapid clip, while the budget for
data storage, management and retrieval remains the same.
03
DATA EVERYWHERE, BUT NOT A BYTE TO USE?
For every dollar spent on
license fees for Enterprise
Content Management
Systems, organisations
spend $8 on additional
costs.

For many organizations an ECMS is irreplaceable tool, capturing and
managing business data and enabling version and access controls.
However, finding meaning amongst all the information stored in a content
management system is a constant challenge.
Analysts and decisions makers in an organization seek relevant and
contextual information to identify business opportunities and risks, and end
up spending up to half of their time in searching for the right documents.
This lack of ease of using an enterprise content management system and
the difficulty in retrieving information when it is actually needed and the
context in which it is needed, drives user acceptance down and we observe
organizations spending a large portion of their IT budget on ECMSes that
aren’t even used by a majority of the target audience.
04
DATA EVERYWHERE, BUT NOT A BYTE TO USE?
Findability
The ease with
which information
contained in a
content management
system, a database
or a website can be
found.
Machine Learning
Use of artificial
intelligence
algorithm to learn
natural language
from users and
documents to
present search
results that the user
wants.
Natural Language
Processing
Enabling programs
to understand and
process human or
natural language
input.

ECMS Software Licence fees $5.34
Database licence fees
Server License fees
VM licences
Initial implementation
Personnel costs
a. Project Manager, Change Manager, Analyst
b. System, Database & SharePoint administrators
c. Information Manager & architect
d. Records Manager
e. In-house counsel
f. Trainer
Required sub-projects
a. Information Governance Planning
b. Disposal & Retention Planning
c. E-Discovery planning
d. Roll-out and training
e. Information Architecture planning and execution
f. Project Management, Recruitment and HR
Microsoft Partner fee
Hardware - Servers
Ongoing annual costs
i. System, database & SharePoint administrators
ii. Increased storage costs from storage growth
iii. Downtime rectification
iv. New sites and users deployed, old sites and
users actioned
v. Archiving
vi. Hardware replacement and annual DR costs
$42.99
Monthly Total Cost of Ownership per employee
TCO for 5,000 strong organisation
US$48
~US$ 250,000
For every dollar spent on license fees for Enterprise Content
Management Systems, organizations spend $8 on additional costs
(check inset box for costs analysis), accumulating to a quarter of a
million dollars spend each month for a typical organization with 5,000
employees.
Add to that 17% of the typical employee’s time spent searching for
information, and the cost of information access and low user adoption
adds up to ~$13.5m a year for a 5000 strong company.
With that high per head cost of delivering a content management
system, you need to look harder into getting the most return on every
dollar spent.
Here are some of the key issues that keep organizations from
extracting most value out of their ECMS investment.
2 https://rcpmag.com/articles/2012/10/30/sharepoint-costs-more.aspx
3 http://cfour.fishbowlsolutions.com/2010/07/23/calculating-e20-roi-lack-of-information-management-costs-2700-
per-user-per-year/
05
23 REASONS YOUR ECMS MAY NOT
BE DELIVERING SUFFICIENT ROI
TOTAL COSTS OF RUNNING AN ECMS
2
3

2. 1. Relevant results - text vs context
The definition of ‘SEARCH’ – (v.) TO LOOK CAREFULLY IN ORDER TO FIND
SOMETHING.
Storing documents would be utterly futile if they weren’t findable. Most
companies investing in an ECMS do not actually derive real search value.
85% of the relevant documents are never even retrieved during search and
91% users abandon their search because they can’t find relevant results in
the first page. There are a number of time-sensitive business requirements
in which simple ‘text based’ searches are simply not enough.
For example, a text search on the term “Security” may return results in a
financial organization’s ECMS that simply contain that word. The search
results may contain documents pertaining to ‘bio security’, ‘data security’
etc. when the user was most probably looking for all the documents on
tradeable financial assets (security).
Likewise, when all a user remembers is a synonym of what they are actually
searching for, it can be frustrating not getting relevant results. A case in
point being a business user in a pharma company searching for something
in a context where a drug has a primary chemical name, multiple brand
names across different regional markets and an active ingredient name and
a symbol.
06

A context-based findability tool would present such related documents
together, saving the user and the business, time and money.
Similarly, Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) in contact centers and
self-help portals heavily rely on knowledge bases. To minimize the time
spent on service calls and increase user satisfaction, a CSR needs to locate
correct content instantly.
In a simplistic text-based search environment, the CSR would have
to disregard a number of irrelevant search results to focus on useful
information.
In contrast, a ‘findability’ engine would deliver contextual search results
based on pre-categorization, semantics and machine learning, which help
the user find documents they want, instead of focusing on the exact search
words they used. Without a specialist core search component, the business
case for an ECMS is weakened – the business pays for it, yet derives little
value from it.
07

2. 2. Organizing documents – the need for speed
Whether the demand for rapid data retrieval is placed by regulators,
auditors or M&A requirements, crude text based searches are a recipe for
delays and frustration.
In large enterprises, government departments and other highly regulated
organizations, a lot of senior management’s valuable time is spent filing
away forms and then searching for information as and when it is needed.
Not only does this frustrate managers, delayed or inaccurate strategic
decisions made due to the lack of easily available business information can
lead to lost business opportunities, increased costs and poor long-term
investments.
Imposing a classification regime can mitigate organizational risks arising out
of inaccurate and slow information retrieval.
The international standard in information management – ISP 15489
mentions “The higher the level of accountability and/or public scrutiny,
the greater the need for accuracy and speed in locating individual records.
The greater the risks in the business activity, for example public safety
concerning hazardous chemicals, the greater the need for precision and
control in retrieval”.
step
08

09
2. 3. Unclogging the business machine and managing
risk – retaining only the data we need
The storage requirements and corresponding costs at organizations
is growing every year, even though only a third of that data stored is
actually relevant and valuable, while the rest of the documents are
perfect candidates for disposal. That is tremendous amount of waste of
budgets that are already under strain to do more with less.
Even when the budgets are increased to keep up with storage demands,
in the absence of retention and disposal policies and tools, organizations
still end up retaining years of old emails about social activities or multiple
versions of the same document, even when there is no justifiable business
cause to hold on to them.
The cost of storing, archiving and backing nearly all data without
discrimination quickly adds up.
In the scenario that the redundant, outdated and trivial documents
are not disposed of, it is imperative to have smart findability tools in
place that will automatically identify documents that contain sensitive
information.

This allows rapid migration of such content to appropriately protected and
managed locations.
A metadata extraction or automatic document tagging tool improves
ECMS searches by creating clearly classified and categorized metadata and
providing relevant search refiners.
Also, a key component of an effective information governance framework
is the application of a defensible deletion policy, which helps to safeguard
information assets, reduce corporate risk while freeing up storage
resources and streamlining workflows. Without a content discovery tool,
it is hard to distinguish which information is important for the organization
and should absolutely not be deleted and emails and other documents that
may not be worth storing and archiving.
A findability tool allows organizations to manage their risk by matching
documents against retention policies, identifying similar and duplicate
documents and an overall better data governance.
10
…only 30% of the documents in a business are relevant and valuable
while the rest are perfect candidates for disposal. Contrast that
with storage requirements (and corresponding costs) in typical
organisations growing by 45-60% every year.

Using a tool that allows companies to automatically categorize and tag
documents can assist in information retrieval tasks such as e.g. which
documents are legal agreements, or which documents contain information
around operational risk issues.
Such improvements in an ECM environment provide relevant search
refiners (commonly known as filtered search), allowing users to ignore
irrelevant search results by filtering results based on provided categories,
topics and other types of metadata.
Deploying a business classification scheme with a context based search
engine, allows information management teams to categorize content
and consistently make business decisions around document retention
and disposal. This tagging and classification regimen reduces storage and
database licensing costs and aids compliance and data retrieval at the same
time.
11
3THE FINDABILITY ENGINE AND
THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

In an organization’s IT lifecycle, adding a content discovery tool enhances
the value of the entire ECMS investment - when either migrating data to an
ECMS for the first time, or when upgrading an ECMS.
This is when information managers can decide what data needs to be
migrated and enable automatic tagging and metadata creation. This process
can even fix previous mistakes and fill in missing parts in the metadata
schema.
When choosing a data discovery tool that helps extract the most value out
of the ECMS investment, look for one that is a true findability engine and
delivers results for the following business needs:
a. World class findability
A discovery application that allows users to easily pick out the information
they need and use natural language to perform searches amplifies the value
of an ECMS.
b. Automatic Metadata and machine learning
For a fraction of the cost of an ECMS, a discovery tool should automate
metadata creation for every single document that is created, removing the
dependence on team members to perform this task manually. This will lead
to tagging and metadata consistency across the database.
12
4ECMS MIGRATION AND UPGRADES –
THE IDEAL TIME TO IMPLEMENT BETTER CONTENT DISCOVERY
A findability engine allows
pages and documents in a
knowledge management
system to be automatically
tagged by topic, allowing
customer service
representatives or users
themselves to locate relevant
content and filter out
documents they don’t need.
Evidence of the success of
such tools and techniques
can be observed in service
desk call centres and
the reduction in issue
resolution and call times
because the service
representatives can find
relevant information
faster.

c. To reduce storage requirements
Pick a findability engine that will help discover all files on the file shares and
identify redundant, outdated or trivial information, giving the organization
control over what to keep and what to dispose of.
d. Multiple languages
If your business is spread across multiple countries and has stakeholders
who interact in different languages, it is imperative you pick a tool that does
everything you ask it to do, in the languages your teams speak.
At Pingar, we’ve delivered content discovery solutions to organizations
across large financial services firms, government departments, pharma &
life sciences companies, among others, and seen the amplified value our
clients have derived out of their SharePoint and other enterprise content
management systems.
13
ECMS MIGRATION AND UPGRADES
You can greatly improve
the quality of the due
diligence effort and cost
savings achieved by pre-
categorizing content.
The Mergers and Acquisitions imperative for Findability
When businesses grow inorganically with mergers and
acquisitions (M&A), the deal times involved work to tight time
frames to complete due-diligence and post-merger integration.
The speed of organising content for an M&A deal room is
often hampered by the lack of pre-categorized content, often
depending mostly on finding the right people to just know where
to find documents immediately, or relying on basic text searches
through a content management system.
You can greatly improve the quality of the due diligence effort and
cost savings achieved by pre-categorizing content, which can be
retrieved from an ECMS at a moment’s notice.
A specialised discovery application can categorise typical content
found in an M&A data room such as financial and tax reports, HR
documents, contracts and agreements etc., wherever they reside,
without needing to set up specialised systems or directories.

14
DiscoveryOne from Pingar is a multi-platform content discovery system that supports a variety
of enterprise content management systems, including SharePoint, file-shares and more. It
is a scalable, enterprise-grade system that can work through tens or hundreds of millions of
documents.
It extracts meaning from the natural language contained in massive volumes of documents, emails,
and webpages and allows organizations to find the information they need, when they need it.
Pingar DiscoveryOne lets enterprises identify opportunities and risks hidden in the text of
corporate and web data. It reduces the cost of document storage, security and compliance.
DiscoveryOne’s powerful text analytics engine reads millions of pages in hours identifying what
content matters most to analysts and information management professionals. Our solutions will
point you to the trends, topics and issues exposed in those documents, posts, articles and emails.
Drill down within minutes to the right content out of millions of documents so you can be a step
ahead.
Talk to us now to find out how you can get the most out of your ECMS investment.
5ABOUT PINGAR

Learn more
DiscoveryOneTM
DiscoveryOne Content Enrichment is the
easiest way to improve search, enable
defensible deletion and identify document
security risks. By reading, categorizing
and tagging documents, DiscoveryOne
automatically creates metadata. This
metadata can be used in systems such as
enterprise search, document management,
email and CRM.
CONTENT ENRICHMENT
DiscoveryOne Content Inventory reads file
systems to present an overview of what
they contain. It identifies documents that
are redundant, outdated, trivial, or useful
and worth retaining. Usually, a file system
contains only 25% of relevant, valuable and
useful content, the rest are candidates for
disposal.
CONTENT INVENTORY
www.pingar.com | North America +1 408 663 2328 | Asia Pacific +64 9 950 3299 | Europe and Asia +91 80 4212 7047 | info@pingar.com
Learn more

The Search for Meaning: Why 'findability' can help maximize your ECMS investment

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The Search for Meaning: Why 'findability' can help maximize your ECMS investment