Enterprise Search? "It's Dead" - Jim

“Enterprise Search is Dead” – so said well-known commentator @JamesLappin when speaking at the ARMA / NAID / PRISM joint conference in London last week.  No-one is buying it and no-one is really selling it, he went on, and I must admit the glister does appear to have gone from this particular technology trend.   His point, and one I agree with, is that everyone thought we were going to get Google-style search and everyone was therefore disappointed when that didn’t happen – and it didn’t happen because optimising search for one type of system (albeit a big one), the Internet, is far more straightforward than searching multiple complex systems with different architectures, platforms, databases and security models.

But of course, the demise on one particular marketing tag doesn’t stop us all needing to be able to find stuff when we need it, get rid of it when it is no longer of any use, and produce it when we are asked (or forced) to.   So how do we do that?  Well, of course, we have to use metadata (often alongside searching the content) and so the challenge moving forward will remain as it was before Enterprise Search came along - extracting, storing and accessing metadata from a variety of repositories via a single interface or integration (say, Outlook?) to allow us to create, capture, store, manage, preserve and deliver our precious content.  And then when we need it, for an auditor, regulator, legislator or litigator we can produce it without having to start a new project every time – document production is business-as-usual these days.

So what technology do we use to help us?  Well that is the wrong question to ask first.  What we need to do first is take a good, long hard look at our current information environment and the needs of our information workers and start looking at awareness, skill sets, organisational and operational accountability, the current information map, integrity, security and availability and then, perhaps, when we know where we are now and where we want to get to, we can have a look at the technology we might need to support our requirements, whatever the label on the tin.  And what do we call that? We call it Information Governance – for now.

Ethical Retention Policies or Information Anxiety?

It’s the quintessential records management question – what should I keep and for how long?  Now there are lots of different opinions on this one with one of the most interesting coming from the fantastically named Big Men on Content (a group for me if ever there was one).  Lee Dallas of that parish made out the case for keeping everything saying that this amounted to an ethical retention policy because knowing that all records will be kept forever would make an organisation behave in an appropriate manner at all times – “it is probably just the right thing to do” he says in an excellent article you can see at http://bit.ly/nPp4cK.  Whilst this is an interesting point of view, it is not one that I agree with – and I’m not sure that the records managers I know would agree either.   The natural extension of the argument is that any kind of retention / deletion schedule has some element of dishonesty about it or is, at best, a little disingenuous.  Most of the people who actually draw up retention schedules in real life would, I think, take issue with that.

And then there’s the practical issue of actually finding stuff, which is where the corporate becomes personal – see the excellent article in Management Week by Lynne Brindley (http://bit.ly/vlpylb) discussing strategies for managers to reduce what she calls “information anxiety” – too much information in too many formats.  Her concluding observation is that that “curation might be taking over from search” as the method by which you find the information you need.   Curation – the idea of assessment, assignment of value and relevance and subsequent retention of the most valuable and relevant.  Familiar?  Sounds a bit like records management to me and a better, and equally ethical, alternative to keeping everything forever.