Here is the second in a series of my notes on the 2010 Enterprise Search Summit.  The session, Improving Findability Inside the Firewall, was lead by Bob Boeri, Sr. ECM Consultant, Management Consulting, Guident Technologies. Here is the session overview. My notes follow.

“Improving findability inside the firewall requires a holistic, integrated strategy that goes beyond selecting and installing an enterprise search solution. Challenges include content growing out of control, security requirements, and legal imperatives such as electronic records management and e-discovery. Business, IT, and records managers have different and often conflicting approaches to these problems. Although there is no quick fix to tame the findability beast, this presentation draws on the real-world experiences of a consultant and employee in federal agencies and large insurance and biopharmaceutical firms for a strategic approach to improving findability.”

Bob was introduced by Michelle Manafy, ESS conference sponsor and eContent editor. Bob writes for eContent frequently. I have also done this on occasion.  Bob began by covering the IT side (or analytic) and the business side (who know what they want but find it difficult to express).  They need to work in close partnership.  There are three aspects of any findability project: content, culture (and people), business process. He calls it findability as people want to find, not search.  Findability involves: organizing and searching content, semantics, and interface design.  Documents are also becoming more social so there is much more than just picking the right search engine.

Bob defines a document as a file you can perceive with one or more senses. It is not a database but can be an image or an audio file.  ISO 15489: “recorded information or object which can be treated as a unit.” Can be used as a legal document or evidence.  Documents are 80% of our business knowledge assets and databases, etc. are the other 20%.

Why is findability hard? There are different formats, places, quantity, language, rights, processes, and people.  I would stress the last one as finding is very relevant to the finder’s own needs and cognitive orientation.  Because of these challenges, findability needs to be approached holistically.  The stages are: initiate, analyze, design, build, deliver, and then began again at analyze and go through the cycle again on an ongoing basis.

Bob then went through each of these stages, asking the key questions. I like the approach as he did not present his approach as best practices but as context dependent suggestions of what to consider.  You need to align the business and IT sides

He said that the average office worker wastes about 1400 pages of paper printing the wrong stuff. In a company of 500 people that amounts to $42,000 a year in wasted supplies, not counting the time involved.  Here is another reason for a good information strategy.  It is also a green issue. Today many green issues are related to cost issues.

Governance is another overlooked issue. Without this the system will degenerate. Bob mentioned Andy Grove’s book, Only the Paranoid Survive as a good guide. Bob offers his findability checklist at his email: bboeri@guident. I like his holistic approach.