We asked a dozen seasoned professionals in the enterprise content and records management community the following question: “In 50-100 words, what is the single most important success factor in ensuring the findability of electronic business information?”

Standardized Information Infrastructure
A consistent information infrastructure (taxonomy) and standardized metadata were the most frequent findability success factors mentioned. As IBM software implementer, John P. Frost, CRM, explained, “A taxonomy will consist of the enterprise metadata schema, will allow for true data sharing, and thus ensure enterprise findability. A taxonomy can also assist with the protection of intellectual property and is the basic necessity for preventative compliance, as elements of the taxonomy allow for proper classification, location, process routing, retention, reporting, auditing, and security.” Theresa Regli, principal analyst at CMS Watch, described these success factors as content hygiene, “Making sure your content is “clean”—consistently structured, organized, and categorized, with semantically rich metadata, is the best way to ensure that content technologies will be able to work with it and find precise content when needed. I’ve seen too many huge investments in enterprise search and content management systems fail because software gets blamed for what’s really a problem of content organization.”

End User Perspective
Understanding end user requirements and the search context were both identified as success factors. Thirty-year RM practitioner, Doug Allen, Global 360 Information Outsource Services, called attention to the need for careful analysis of these elements because, “how electronic information is found may vary depending on the business process of a specific group or subgroup.” Cheryl McKinnon, industry expert, Open Text Corporation, added that understanding the search context allows presentation of the content “in ways that help users make better business decisions.” She urges organizations to provide “a culture of continuous improvement by such techniques as system monitoring, user feedback, best practices, and new methods and technologies.” End user confidence in the search results was mentioned by two respondents. Russ Stalters, global director, Information & Records, BP, emphasized that sound business decisions must be based on tools and techniques to ensure, “that the information they [end users] found is current, accurate, and authentic.” Automatic linking of business information to the corporate taxonomy will also help increase user confidence according to Art Bellis, vice president of Sales & Compliance, OmniRIM Solutions Inc., classification of information to an organization’s taxonomy “must become an automated process to be successful, as the inaccuracy of end user classification will lead to a lack of trust and rejection of the technology.”

Full Content and Cross Repository Searching
Julie Gable, president, Gable Consulting LLC, emphasized the value of full content searching for certain kinds of searchess, “Sophisticated full text and mining software work well for exploratory searches that seek to answer open questions such as, ‘Did we ever do anything with compound x’ provided that indexing terms can help to constrain the search, thereby improving relevance of results. Routine searches directed at a specific goal—the search for a customer file, for example—profit from indexing terms that closely mirror what the searcher is likely to know: customer name, account number, last purchase date, etc.” Without standardization of an organization’s information infrastructure, cross-repository searching is critical according to Mike Alsup, president of Gimmal Group, “Until we achieve much more standardization in enterprise document lifecycles with migration of electronic content into more integrated records repositories, the single most important success factor in findability is effective cross-repository search. This integrates both metadata and full content searching across repositories and relevance ranking of the resulting content. It also includes the ability of users to nominate or limit the repositories to be searched.”

Legal Perspective
Attorney and RM expert John Isaza, Howett Isaza Law Group, recommends that organizations start by creating a data map or inventory of all the different business systems or applications where information including records is stored, “Putting aside arguments about inaccessible information and Safe Harbor exceptions for “routine good faith operations,” discoverability of ESI includes all electronically stored information, irrespective of the source. The data map, thus, should include not only enterprise systems and any other company-wide applications, but also information stored with third-party service providers (TSP). The test the courts would use is whether the information is within the respondent’s custody or control. This is why the data map needs to include TSP’s, an issue that could easily be overlooked even at the most organized institutions.”

Search Specialist
Led by DeBe Wantzloeben, CRM, senior manager of Records Compliance and Business Relations, Valero Energy Corporation, has implemented a successful enterprise change management campaign for managing email retention. She identified several factors that impact findability, including search interfaces, quality of the search engine, and quality and volume of the content being searched; however, one of her success factors was particularly interesting, “Having a search specialist who understands the complexity of the search engine’s syntax appears to be an important resource for our company so that whatever method we use, especially involving e-discovery, can be repeatable.”

In the end, organizations can implement state-of-the-art findability technology customized for its business process and still fail as Peter Morville reminds us in his book Ambient Findability. “In matters of findability, the siren song of technology has lured many to destruction. Though our attention is drawn to the fast layers of hi-tech, the map to this maze is buried in the slow layers of human behavior and psychology.”

--Susan Cisco , Ph.D., CRM, FAI (susan.cisco@gimmal.com), is a director in Gimmal Group’s Enterprise Content Management  services organization. Susan brings more than 25 years of experience in the records and information management field as a practitioner, educator, and consultant. She is a member of ARMA’s Company of Fellows.