Concept Searching: More Smart Content Rah Rah
September 23, 2014
I read “Concept Searching Taxonomy Workflow Tool solving Migration, Security, and Records Management Challenges.” This is a news release and it can disappear at any time. Don’t hassle me if it is a goner. The write up walks me rapidly into the smart content swamp. The idea is that content without indexing is dumb content. Okay. Lots of folks are pitching the smart versus dumb content idea now.
The fix? Concept Searching provides a smart tool to make content intelligent; that is, include index terms. For the youngster at heart, “indexing” is the old school word for metadata.
The company’s news announcement asserts:
conceptTaxonomyWorkflow serves as a strategic tool, managing enterprise metadata to drive business processes at both the operational and tactical levels. It provides administrators with the ability to independently manage access, information management, information rights management, and records management policy application within their respective business units and functional areas, without the need for IT support or access to enterprise-wide servers. By effectively and accurately applying policy across applications and content repositories, conceptTaxonomyWorkflow enables organizations to significantly improve their compliance and information governance initiatives.
The product name is indeed a unique string in the Google index. The company asserts that the notion of a workflow is strategic. Not only is workflow strategic, it is also tactical. For some, this is a two for one deal that may be heard to resist. The tool allows administrators to perform what appears to be tasks I think of “editorial policy” or as the young at heart say, information governance.
The only issue for me is that the organizations with which I am familiar have pretty miserable information governance methods. What I find is that organizations have Balkanized methods for dealing with digital information. Examples of poor information governance fall readily to hand. The US court system removed public documents only to reinstate them. The IRS in the US cannot locate email. And when the IRS finds an archive of the email, the email cannot be searched. And, of course, there is Mr. Snowden. How many documents did he remove from NSA servers?
The notion that the CTW tool makes it possible to “apply policy across applications and content repositories” sounds absolutely fantastic to a person with indexing experience. There is a problem. Many organizations do not understand an editorial policy or are willing to do much more than react when something goes off the tracks. The reality is that the appetite for meaningful action is often not in commercial enterprises or government entities. Budgets remain tight. Reducing information technology budgets is often a more important goal than improve information technology.
What’s this mean?
My hunch is that Concept Searching is offering a product for an organization that [a] has an editorial policy in place or [b] wants to appear to be taking meaning steps toward useful information governance.
The president of Concept Searching is taking a less pragmatic approach to selling this tool. Martin Garland, according to the company story, states:
Managing metadata and auto-classifying to taxonomies provides high value in applications such as search, text analytics, and business social. But many forward thinking organizations are now looking to leverage their enterprise metadata and use it to improve business processes aligned with compliance and information governance initiatives. To accomplish this successfully, technologies such as conceptTaxonomyWorkflow must be able to qualify metadata and process the content based on enterprise policies. A key benefit of the product is its ease of use and rapid deployment. It removes the lengthy application development cycle and can be used by a large community of business specialists as well as IT.
The key benefit, for me, is that a well conceived and administered information policy eliminates risks of an information misstep. I would suggest that the Snowden matter was a rather serious misstep.
One assumes that companies have information policies, stand behind them, and keep them current. This strikes me as a quite significant assumption.
A similar message is now being pushed by Smartlogic, TEMIS, WAND, and other “indexing” companies.
Are these products delivering essentially similar functionality? Is any system indexing with less than a 10 percent error rate? Are those with responsibility for figuring out what to do with the flood of digital information equipped to enforce organization wide policies? And once installed, will the organization continue to commit resources to support tools that manage indexing? What happens if Microsoft Azure Search and Delve deliver good enough indexing and controls?
These are difficult questions to answer. Based on the pivoting content processing vendors are doing, most companies selling information solutions are trying to find a way to boost revenues in an exhausting effort to maintain stable cash flows.
Does anyone make an information governance tool that keeps track of what information retrieval companies market?
Stephen E Arnold, September 23, 2014
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