keyword search

Productivity and InfoGov; Are they Related?

Bill Tolson Information Governance , , ,

SymbiosisYes they are. Employee productivity is adversely affected by a lack of information governance (IG) in two ways. First, without IG, employees spend time “managing” their work files, contacts, emails and attachments. This management time includes reviewing content, deciding whether a particular file or email should be kept or deleted, deciding how long required emails will be kept and where, and finally, moving these files to their final storage location. Many research organizations and experts have stated that this content management time is estimated to consume anywhere from two to four hours per week. Consider a conservative example of two hours per week for this activity: this translates to 104 hours per year per employee or, for an organization of 5,000 employees, 520,000 hours per year devoted to individually managing data – that may or may not have been performed efficiently or effectively.

A second measure of lost employee productivity is in the number of hours per week that employees spend searching for information within the enterprise. Organizations without a centrally managed information management capability usually don’t actively manage employee file shares. When searchable central indexes are not available, employees fall back on simple keyword searches – which rarely produce the results the employee is looking for in a timely manner, if at all. In some cases, stored information might not be found due to weak or incorrect search terms, poor file naming, or the fact that the file wasn’t actually saved at all (i.e. the employee just thought it was).

This lack of information management can cost an organization a great deal and not even realize it.

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The ROI of Conceptual Search

Bill Tolson Information Governance , , , , ,

After people, information is a company’s most valuable asset. But many are asking; “what’s in that information?”, “who controls it?”, “can others access it?”, and “is it a risk to keep?”, “for how long?”. The vast majority of information in any organization is not managed, not indexed, and is rarely–if ever–accessed.

Companies exist to create and utilize information. Do you know where all your organization’s information is, what’s in it, and most importantly, can those that need it find and access it? If your employees can’t find when they need it, then the return on investment (ROI) for that information is zero. How much higher could the ROI be if your employees could actually find and share data effortlessly?

Enterprise search – The mindless regurgitation of keyword matches

Enterprise search is the organized query/retrieval of information from across an organization’s enterprise data systems. Data sources include e-mail servers, application databases, content management systems, file systems, intranet sites and many others. Legacy enterprise search systems provide users the ability to query organizational data repositories utilizing keyword-based inquiries that returns huge results sets that then have to be manually filtered by the user until they find what they were looking for (if they actually find it).

A sizeable drawback to a keyword-based search is that it will return all keyword matches even though they may be conceptually different – false positives.

What is conceptual search?

A conceptual search is used to search electronically stored information for information that is conceptually a match or similar to the information represented in a search query as opposed to a keyword search where only documents with exact keyword matches are returned. In other words, the ideas expressed in the information retrieved in response to a concept search query are relevant to the ideas contained in the text of the query regardless of shared terms or language.

Cost savings – Concept versus keyword search

Employees are rarely capable of constructing keyword and Boolean searches that return the data they are looking for immediately. Because of this fact, time is wasted in actually finding what they were looking for. IDC has estimated that using a higher quality enterprise search capability can save up to 53.4% of time spent searching for data. Many have argued conceptual search can save even more time because conceptual search more closely models how humans think and therefor will return more meaningful results quicker.

Alan Greenspan, a past Chairman of the Federal Reserve, once stated “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts”. Return on Investment calculations are only as good as the reliability of the variables used to calculate it. To calculate ROI, the benefit (return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment – the result is expressed as a percentage.

Enterprise Search ROI calculations require the following data points:

•           The total cost of the current enterprise search process used

•           The total cost of the new enterprise search process after the investment is in place

•           The total cost of the new enterprise search investment

The actual ROI formula looks like this:


Return on investment is an often asked for but little understood financial measure. Many equate cost savings to ROI but cost savings is only a part of the equation. ROI also includes looking at the cost of the solution that produced the savings. ROI lets you compare returns from various investment opportunities to make the best investment decision for your available dollars.

Organizations run on information. If information is easier to find and use, the organization profits from it.

A Fox, a Henhouse, and Custodial Self-Collection

Bill Tolson Information Governance , , , , ,

Judge Scheindlin just issued an opinion in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case National Day Laborer Organizing Network et al. v. United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, et al. 2012 U.S. Dist. Lexis 97863 (SDNY, July 13, 2012). This dispute focuses on plaintiffs’ attempts to obtain information from several US government agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency,   and the Department of Homeland Security. Specifically, the plaintiffs have sought information regarding “Secure Communities”, a federal immigration enforcement program launched in 2008.

In December 2010, after the defendants failed to comply with their obligations under the agreement, Judge Scheindlin ordered them to produce the records on a new “drop dead date”. With the new date in mind, the defendants’ searched hundreds of employees expending thousands of hours and resulted in the production of tens of thousands of responsive records.

The plaintiffs argued the searches had been insufficient i.e. that the agencies failed to conduct any searches of the files of certain custodians who were likely to possess responsive records. Another complaint was that the defendants had not established that the searches that they did conduct were adequate.

On the issue of relying on custodians to “self-collect” i.e., conduct appropriate and legally defensible searches themselves, she writes:

“There are two answers to defendants’ question. First, custodians cannot ‘be trusted to run effective searches,’ without providing a detailed description of those searches, because FOIA places a burden on defendants to establish that they have conducted adequate searches; FOIA permits agencies to do so by submitting affidavits that ‘contain reasonable specificity of detail rather than merely conclusory statements.’ Defendants’ counsel recognize that, for over twenty years, courts have required that these affidavits ‘set [ ] forth the search terms and the type of search performed.’ But, somehow, DHS, ICE, and the FBI have not gotten the message. So it bears repetition: the government will not be able to establish the adequacy of its FOIA searches if it does not record and report the search terms that it used, how it combined them, and whether it searched the full text of documents.”

“The second answer to defendants’ question has emerged from scholarship and case law only in recent years: most custodians cannot be ‘trusted’ to run effective searches because designing legally sufficient electronic searches in the discovery or FOIA contexts is not part of their daily responsibilities. Searching for an answer on Google (or Westlaw or Lexis) is very different from searching for all responsive documents in the FOIA or e-discovery context.”

“Simple keyword searching is often not enough: ‘Even in the simplest case requiring a search of on-line e-mail, there is no guarantee that using keywords will always prove sufficient.’ There is increasingly strong evidence that ‘[k]eyword search[ing] is not nearly as effective at identifying relevant information as many lawyers would like to believe.’ As Judge Andrew Peck — one of this Court’s experts in e-discovery — recently put it: ‘In too many cases, however, the way lawyers choose keywords is the equivalent of the child’s game of ‘Go Fish’ … keyword searches usually are not very effective.’”

Custodial self-discovery has been falling out of favor with some Judges for several reasons. First, the defense attorney should be overseeing the discovery process to ensure correctness and completeness. In many courts, the attorney has to certify that the discovery process was done correctly… and what attorney wants to do that if they didn’t really manage it?

In a recent Law.com article written by Ralph Losey, Ralph pointed out that custodial self-discovery was “equivalent to the fox guarding the hen house”.