The main question enterprise search answers for your information and records management program.

Is whether you've got problems with it.

Enterprise search in its most basic form automates one task - typing stuff into the search bar.

So that you don't have to have someone doing it across many systems.

It leaves you with people

Searching for stuff.

Then reading it.

Which is so

19

80's.

Great records management leaves you with effectively structured, placed and tagged information assets that people and machines can find and process efficiently.

The challenge is that when records management operates at low levels of effectiveness,

Information assets are so incomplete,

And so poorly placed,

That it leaves you with no other option than

People reading stuff

And trying to work out whether it's complete.

Which is infinitely harder than reading stuff and deciding whether it's significant.

So if you're thinking about enterprise search, records management probably isn't delivering on findability.

What's interesting about this, is that when I talk to a lot of records managers, they'll say that findability is principle number 1.

Often, they'll then go back to a records system that they built, that presents a classification system to users that is completely and utterly incomprehensible to them, and renders containers unfindable for useful placement of records, and records unfindable for people who are looking.

And when placement is inconsistent,

Findability is uncertain,

Automation is impossible,

And enterprise search seems like the only viable solution to make things findable again.

How on earth did we get here?

Think differently? Please persuade me.