Search - the key elements for organization information leverage

Recently, I received the free paper edition of the Enterprise Search Source Book. The digital edition of the book is available here.

I tried to skim through all the articles in the booklet. The essence of the articles , I would summarize in the following statements:

1. Search input needs to be more contextual while capturing user intentions

2. The search result presentation should be innovative enough to efficiently deliver what user is looking for.

3. The core search mechanism has not changed over time.

4. Making the content search-able is the core to have an effective search feature in an organization.

5. Search tools effectiveness depends on the quality of the information it searching upon.

6. Search tool should fit into the enterprise business and IT architecture .

7. Organization's business strategy, information culture and internal leadership plays a big role in making Search tool an effective approach to information leverage.

A high level view of the search in an organizational context links these elements.

IDAR : Integrated Document Archiving and Retrieval System

Gartner's Magic Quadrant Reports for IDAR systems.

Currently, I am involved in implementing a IDAR system , also called Enterprise Report Management System. I will be focusing to write about IDAR as I move ahead in this project.

ECM has to be process oriented , but which process ?

ECM has to be process oriented. How do you find out the processes? Are all processes are same ? Would organizations treat all the processes similar way  ? Can a process be looked as intertwined with multiple processes ?  Do your ECM implementation team is aware of these questions ? These questions has answer to ECM Implementation strategy ?

Look out this space more on these topics !!

Business case for ECM

It is easy to get carried out by the pitches of ECM vendors. But organization should look beyond the vendor taglines, and look what is the real case for ECM. The ECM business case can be looked from different perspectives. Some of them are :

1. Organizational perspective


2. IT perspective


3. Departmental perspective

Legal Compliance and overall productivity improvement may be the key driving force from an organizational perspective, where as IT cost consolidation and better enterprise information architecture compliance can be the business case at CIO level. Does individual departments gain from ECM ? It depends ! . Is your business process well established so that an ECM can bind the departments with business information ? Do the departments find value in sharing info across departmental boundaries ? If this is the case, it makes a business case for the departments to support an ECM implementation.

Finally, business case is live value proposition which needs to be revisited as you move in the ECM journey.

Another Blog.....

There is so much debate about ECM ! What is correct and what is wrong ? This blog attempts to talk about the real life scenario of ECM Implementation .....Less about product ....more about solution and the experience of doing it ...