Bridging the IT-Business Information Gap
Enterprises can lower costs while delivering real-time enterprise search capabilities, security and regulatory compliance.
By Suresh Madhavan, PointCross
Aug. 04, 2008
Information is the most valuable currency in a knowledge business. And almost all of that currency is buried in digital form in e-mails, documents, data sheets, and databases-all of it moving rapidly across networks. Unfortunately, much of the information technology available today creates barriers to searching for this information, thus driving up corporate costs in three essential ways: search inefficiency, security problems, and compliance headaches.
Search capability needs to extend beyond finding a document for a particular situation to making information readily available to every business context or topic across the enterprise. Business information must be organized to offer a simple way to deliver a comprehensive search, security, and compliance solution that allows knowledge workers to find information and react in real time.
Security and Compliance Risks Drive Up Corporate Costs
According to McKinsey & Co., people in knowledge-intensive businesses spend as much as 75 percent of their time in tacit interactions. These activities include finding, sharing, developing insights, and making decisions from less-than-perfect information for their core business. They also need to do all of this while complying with internal security needs, regulatory requirements, or to support such activities as legal discovery or litigations. Employees then disperse the work products resulting from such activities via e-mails, documents, reports, presentations, blogs, and some semi-structured information.
The American Records Management Association says the average worker spends the equivalent of 1.5 to 3 workdays a month searching for those documents. An increasing volume of information is in e-mails, blogs, and instant messages rather than content management systems. In fact, studies reveal that people transfer 75 percent or more of business information through e-mails. Today, business information is very poorly organized and stored. Consider how business information related to a single specific "mission critical" topic, or context, is organized in silos:
This compartmentalized view of disparate information that is tied to business contexts is at the root of huge costs and inefficiency in business operations and a barrier to innovative progress.
Security and compliance are essential in searching and managing information, while controlled complete disclosure is essential for discovery and litigation. All of this adds to indirect costs in the creation and delivery of value-added services.
Security Risks in Search. Making sure disparate business information are not only simultaneously searchable but also filtered to ensure that only authorized personnel can view them is critical. How does a search engine know if it should allow access to an employee's e-mail to another person in the organization? How does it know for whom it should allow access to trade secrets or salaries?
Beyond such "simple" cases, people in project teams create new content that is released to an ever widening audience as drafts get approved and decisions made. How does security authorization change in keeping without additional work by the users?
In short, how does a system ensure that every e-mail, document, or piece of data can be accessed by the people who are authorized to access them, when they are authorized to access them?
Compliance Risks. Compliance is not an option for businesses; it is an essential part of business continuity and health. All indications are that the cost of compliance is increasing out of control. This is due, in part, to the cost of records management. It is also due to the cost of e-discovery, whereby documents are indexed and made searchable for legal purposes. Adding to the complexity, global companies need to comply with many separate sets of laws and regulations concurrently.
How does a system ensure that as people go about their business activities their business communications and work products are subjected to all the relevant rules?
Five Barriers to Simple Searching
Clearly, there is a strong business case for simplifying and speeding the search of e-mails, documents, and data in near real time while at the same time ensuring security and compliance.
Unlike Web searches for information away from work, a knowledge worker is bound by a company's business purposes and therefore subject to limits imposed by corporate policies, business roles, and the security considerations.
Habits of practice and thought have conspired to create five barriers to simplifying the way business information can be organized and communicated.
Barrier #1: Old Ways of Thinking. Legacy information technologies offer only a User-Content-Applications model. A more effective model is based on Business Contexts-Roles-People. The former encourages similar types of information to be stored together while the latter groups information by topics, matter, contexts, or tasks. The former forces the search engine to be more and more sophisticated in finding what is relevant and what is not. The latter separates semantic search, security authorization, and relevance making search safe and fast. Organize first then use it. We believe this disconnect is the root problem in bringing simplicity to information management in businesses.
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Search capability needs to extend beyond finding a document for a particular situation to making information readily available to every business context or topic across the enterprise. Business information must be organized to offer a simple way to deliver a comprehensive search, security, and compliance solution that allows knowledge workers to find information and react in real time.
Security and Compliance Risks Drive Up Corporate Costs
According to McKinsey & Co., people in knowledge-intensive businesses spend as much as 75 percent of their time in tacit interactions. These activities include finding, sharing, developing insights, and making decisions from less-than-perfect information for their core business. They also need to do all of this while complying with internal security needs, regulatory requirements, or to support such activities as legal discovery or litigations. Employees then disperse the work products resulting from such activities via e-mails, documents, reports, presentations, blogs, and some semi-structured information.
The American Records Management Association says the average worker spends the equivalent of 1.5 to 3 workdays a month searching for those documents. An increasing volume of information is in e-mails, blogs, and instant messages rather than content management systems. In fact, studies reveal that people transfer 75 percent or more of business information through e-mails. Today, business information is very poorly organized and stored. Consider how business information related to a single specific "mission critical" topic, or context, is organized in silos:
- Emails are filed in inboxes
- Documents are stored in a user's My Documents folders or in the enterprise Document Management System (DMS)
- Web content is stored in one's favorites or the corporate content management system
- Meetings are organized in individual user's Calendar function but the notes are captured in Excel or Word.
- Tasks are organized in yet other calendars and lists.
This compartmentalized view of disparate information that is tied to business contexts is at the root of huge costs and inefficiency in business operations and a barrier to innovative progress.
Security and compliance are essential in searching and managing information, while controlled complete disclosure is essential for discovery and litigation. All of this adds to indirect costs in the creation and delivery of value-added services.
Security Risks in Search. Making sure disparate business information are not only simultaneously searchable but also filtered to ensure that only authorized personnel can view them is critical. How does a search engine know if it should allow access to an employee's e-mail to another person in the organization? How does it know for whom it should allow access to trade secrets or salaries?
Beyond such "simple" cases, people in project teams create new content that is released to an ever widening audience as drafts get approved and decisions made. How does security authorization change in keeping without additional work by the users?
In short, how does a system ensure that every e-mail, document, or piece of data can be accessed by the people who are authorized to access them, when they are authorized to access them?
Compliance Risks. Compliance is not an option for businesses; it is an essential part of business continuity and health. All indications are that the cost of compliance is increasing out of control. This is due, in part, to the cost of records management. It is also due to the cost of e-discovery, whereby documents are indexed and made searchable for legal purposes. Adding to the complexity, global companies need to comply with many separate sets of laws and regulations concurrently.
How does a system ensure that as people go about their business activities their business communications and work products are subjected to all the relevant rules?
Five Barriers to Simple Searching
Clearly, there is a strong business case for simplifying and speeding the search of e-mails, documents, and data in near real time while at the same time ensuring security and compliance.
Unlike Web searches for information away from work, a knowledge worker is bound by a company's business purposes and therefore subject to limits imposed by corporate policies, business roles, and the security considerations.
Habits of practice and thought have conspired to create five barriers to simplifying the way business information can be organized and communicated.
Barrier #1: Old Ways of Thinking. Legacy information technologies offer only a User-Content-Applications model. A more effective model is based on Business Contexts-Roles-People. The former encourages similar types of information to be stored together while the latter groups information by topics, matter, contexts, or tasks. The former forces the search engine to be more and more sophisticated in finding what is relevant and what is not. The latter separates semantic search, security authorization, and relevance making search safe and fast. Organize first then use it. We believe this disconnect is the root problem in bringing simplicity to information management in businesses.
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