Those Golden Nuggets of Information Just Waiting to be Found

Sometimes when I am searching for information that you know is there and you just can’t find it the results are not only disappointing but highly frustrating. All organizations have some type of search tool and most have some type of enterprise content management, even rudimentary. You may have the greatest ECM solution but without search there is no refinement or contextual insight. Enterprise content is typically scattered throughout the organization and seldom properly managed. Thus there are golden nuggets of information waiting to be found.

Aha – but you force all your end users to tag their documents. Manual tagging is labor intensive, error-prone, and redundant. Even when it happens, it will be inconsistent (I say potato – you say potathoe) and who knows what the co-worker in the next cubicle will think of. There is no consistency with manual tagging despite the best efforts of the organization.

Regardless if you use our technology or not an enterprise metadata framework should be established and a semantic tool used to generate metadata. We eliminate end user tagging all together. At the end of the day a serious approach to content management (80% of information in the organization is text – IDC), content must be tagged, classified, and management so it is reusable and can be found.

I often read postings that appears that manual metadata tagging is the norm. Do you use any of these tools, or tools that help manage content? If not, what are your approaches to effectively manage content so it can not only be found, but the golden nuggets can be retrieved?