Knowledge Management = Enterprise Search…or does it?
How many times have we heard this, that to 'do' Knowledge Management well all you need is an enterprise search tool? That this view is still held by some is not surprising since the first foray of many organisations into the Knowledge Management sphere was through search tools, with Yahoo probably being the biggest.
Our love affair with search engines hasn't changed, even if the subject of our love affair has: Google continues to lead the pack according to industry analyst Gartner, maintaining its position as not only the world’s favourite search engine but also as organisations' favourite enterprise search tool. The Google Search Appliance dominates the marketplace, providing ready access to information assets held in a myriad of business applications, formats, and of an ever increasing scale and size that today’s modern business struggles to maintain and to make use of.
In this era of increasing complexity and with varying levels of information and technology literacy across our organisations - not to mention a myriad of repositories and formats - we need to be able to deliver to our users fast and contextual retrieval and access paths. These need to respect security protocols while surfacing as much relevant content as possible, based on the context of the query, the user profile or the entry point.
For information and records managers the traditional answer has been in "classification", the ability to organise information assets into meaningful categories so that knowledge can be garnered and used. But the way in which we have foisted this on our user community has often been a little heavy handed – a point made by Stuart Laurie of Smartlogic in a recent presentation he gave in Wellington. Our users' expectations of our technology solutions are increasingly high, he told the audience. They do not expect to be forced to add metadata fields or classification codes; their job is to capture information, share it and re-use it. In reality we should be "working smarter not harder, using our systems to drive automatic tagging and classification and reducing the overhead and burden on the user."
We have seen many examples of enterprise search engines being implemented in organisations to varying degrees of success. For the most successful implementations, tools like the Google Search Appliance reach into the plethora of repositories and extract information, making it available to users through their search queries. But while this can be an incredible benefit for organisations over time and with an increasing volume of information being surfaced, users can feel overwhelmed with too much information. This means that in some ways, the ability to find relevant, up to date, accurate, reliable, information is reduced as too many results are returned.
At a conference in Canberra last year many speakers spoke about the effects of 'big data' on our traditional approaches of information classification, organisation and retrieval. In today's world with 'big data' do we need a big solution for contextual retrieval? Simply put – yes we do. We must move away from trying to make users and customers the information professionals and instead treat them as an information consumer by delivering smart systems with appropriate rule sets to quickly and accurately retrieve information based on an appropriate context.
What we need is a more holistic approach to knowledge management. Yes the technology tools are important, but equally so are the rule set and the configuration, monitoring and review of any ‘solution’. And it is a ‘solution’ that we need to focus on, a truly effective Knowledge Management environment leverages and is built on a sustainable platform that utilises proven tools, methodologies and augmented processes, applications and monitoring to deliver the business outcomes we expect.
As Tom Eid, VP Research at Gartner acknowledged "the real value of information access (enterprise search) technologies is in the upfront and ongoing efforts needed to establish effective taxonomies, to index, and to classify content of all kinds that must be accessed. By itself, the search function has limited value."
This view was upheld by Smartlogic’s Stuart Laurie and it is central to the success of the Semaphore solution, which augments not just enterprise search tools like the GSA and FAST, but also content management and business workflow engines. By capturing the vocabularies of the organisation (of which there could be many), we can define important topics, resources and people into a model (list, taxonomy or ontology) which is then used to automatically classify content and enrich it with metadata to deliver a more useful and complete information management experience.
So where do you start if you are truly committed to a useful holistic experience for users? Here are some top tips from the Knowledge Management team at Optimation.
- What problem are you trying to fix?
I am a great believer in ‘right tool, right job’. If the problem you’re trying to resolve is a lax security environment, you need to apply a specific approach; if you’re trying to reduce the time wasted looking for information then a different approach is relevant. Across your Knowledge Management environment you will probably have both of these and lots more, but before you engage in any kind of technology project you must be clear on what outcomes you are trying to achieve. Otherwise you are likely to waste time, people’s brainpower and hard fought financial investment. Take the time to understand the problem and you will save money and increase your chances of success.
- Leverage what already exists
One of the key lessons we have learnt is that in any organisation there are often many examples of taxonomies, descriptive schemas, metadata schemas, website tags etc. Each of them may have a different focus but that doesn't make them irrelevant. You have a significant amount of knowledge inside your organisation already that can help you to build out the semantic web in which you work. Using existing tags can increase adoption of your system as these are tags that people are used to and they often feel more relevant and less artificial in construct. Leverage what you have already before moving to something new and shiny; reuse not recreate!
- Review and refine
The solutions out in the market place are smart, but they're not psychic. As with any other asset you need to keep an eye on them and keep them maintained so that you continue to reap the rewards of your investment. For example, if you undergo a merger and the internal language of the new organisation changes you need to review the tags that are no longer in use and refine the rules so that the new terminology, the new language of the organisation is now in active use. This will also help you to leverage your system as a change agent.
- Rubbish in - rubbish out
Yes technology is smart, yes it looks very cool but there is no magic bullet in any of this. The 'black boxes' of the technology world are just boxes. It is your information professionals who will help you feed them the rules, the tags, and refine them so that the black box you have just invested in becomes a business solution, one that is actively used and consistently delivers practical and measurable benefits for your business.
- Don’t let perfect get in the way of beginning
We can sometimes convince ourselves that we have to wait for the 'perfect' taxonomy, the perfect metadata schema before we can even begin to use these tools. The reality of tools like Smartlogic Semaphore and others is that you don’t need to wait for perfect, you can feed the rules engine with the taxonomies you have, be they FONZ, SONZ, records classification schemas, metadata schemas etc. Start here, and let the rules engine help you, through its monitoring and review tools, to review and refine the ontology, the rules engine and ensure a relevant and useful solution for your internal users and your external customers.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step - Lao Tzu.
About the author:
Optimation's Information Management Practice lead Paula Smith is a self-proclaimed information evangelist based in Wellington NZ. She is passionate about all things information and records management related, being a regular poster of articles, blogs, and opinion pieces across a range of topics from Information Governance to ECM implementations. In her down time she is also the New Zealand Branch President of RIM Professionals Australasia with a focus on advancing the profession and the people who work within it.
