This is my third and final post in which I answer questions that were posed but not answered during the AIIM Market intelligence webinar on its Market IQ on Findability.

Readers may still listen to the recorded webinar during which many other questions were answered and issues discussed. Previous posts also provide additional Q&A on Findability.

Q:  What role does findability play in an organization's taxonomy design and how does it play in the arena of records retention?

A:  Previous posts have dealt with this issue in great detail. What makes this particular question interesting is the way it is posed.  It demonstrates a clear appreciation for the fact that point technologies such as taxonomy and records management  are often incorporated into a Findability strategy.  Findability has a high degree of relevancy and reach across users and technology components.  Corporate taxonomy(ies) is likely a major component to a Findability strategy.  While such taxonomies can be used independently, more than likely they can be positioned complementary to search technology, as both a back-end and front-end complement.  integrated component to search and user interface.  With regards to records management, a Findability strategy may include technology and functionality that will enable some degree of auto-classification and declaration of records, as well as a way to retrieve records.

Q:  Where do you see Automatic Categorization and text analytics in the marketplace?

A:  Text analytics is part science and part art, and as such subject to potentially eternal development and refinement.  But, the technology has evolved  that it is reliable enough, to be positioned in some situations as a first pass to categorizing content (subject to human review).  Text analytics is also foundational to sentiment analysis (used in some BI settings), trends analysis (also used in some BI settings) and in various forms of natural language processing. Automatic categorization based on text analytics is also being use din some eDiscovery applications.

Q:  Should the search and findability tools be embedded in an organization's line-of-business applications or provided as external links, outside of the line-of-business applications?

A:  This is just an opinion – but Findability strategy would likely indicate that search be separated from the business applications and be linked to any and all of them.  This provides a single point of search and access, as discussed in my earlier posts. 

Q:  Discuss the complexity of enterprise search where there are multiple authorizations required (LDAP may be in place but SSO is not) and the search engine needs access to all of these repositories and still manage the access to those authorized but also not display to those not authorized.

A:  Security was the number one ranked feature and technology of a Findability strategy.  It is interesting that Findability is about access, and yet users point to security as the greatest feature.  Do not get me wrong, I agree with user opinion. Security does need to be looked at.  At a recent AIIM roadshow, soemoen shared with me that at his organization they had recently enabled Sharepoint search.  An inquisitive fellow employee issues a query for "social security number or SSN", and was amazed at the amount of content exposed - among it things they should not have been seeing.  While Findability is all about access, it must be reliable, and responsible access. Security is a critical component to a Findability strategy, and should be investigated from many perspectives including technical and interface. Section 5 of our Market IQ report goes into this in great detail.   

Q:  Do you know of organizations that were doing a great job with findability inside the firewall, and what exactly were they doing?

A:  I know of several.  They are all doing different things, but they did have a few things in common.  Each had an internal champion or sponsor who owned Findability (they called it many things, not necessarily Findability). The sponsor was not from IT – tough each worked very closely with IT.  They used a variety of tools and interfaces.  To be honest some of them did not standardize on a single set of tools, but did create a governance concerning which tool(s) were used when.  By the way, the companies I am thinking of come from many different vertical industries: Financial services, consumer food goods manufacturing, legal services and automotive.

Q:  What impact does limiting application integration with our ECM solution have on search across the enterprise?

A:  This can be very large issue. If an ECM system does not simplify (or allow at all) integration of third party functionality such as search and tagging, the content within that repository may remain an island from a Findability perspective. I know of one company whose Findability strategy was short-circuited by an ECM product that did not open up its index or search capability. 

Q:  With an end-to-end set of components being (possibly) Search - Find - Aggregate - Analyze - Actionable - in a informatics methodology, which one has the most well developed tools to select and expand into the other components?

A:  I would have to say search – it is oldest and many tools and techniques are available.  Some of these already offer integration with the others.  Analyze is perhaps the most limited.

Q: Should companies concentrate on Portals for one central UI to access content?

A:  Not necessarily.  There is no harm in this – but Findability can be achieved without a portal. Furthermore I have seen portals where several search scenarios are exposed – not hidden, and thus were not providing a facilitated approach to Findability, but a fragmented non-strategic approach to Findability.