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Blog

Managing Metadata: Don’t Make It Harder Than It Needs to Be

Posted on April 11, 2017June 28, 2020 by Jason McCullagh - MANAGER OF TECHNICAL SERVICES FOR EMEA

My colleagues Don Miller and Mark Aschemeyer published their perspectives about the importance of metadata and connectivity, respectively, when it comes to enterprise search. Their debate is about which is more important in helping users find what they are looking for.

In my opinion, connectivity just makes the need for metadata that much more critical. The aim of this blog is not to try to convince you that metadata is important, but rather to show you that adding metadata to your content enhances enterprise search and it doesn’t even need to be a herculean task.

Historically, building taxonomies and adding metadata has been quite difficult. As Don articulated, companies like Autotrader and Best Buy use a combination of people and automation to make this much easier and more manageable.  In enterprise organisations, automation takes the burden from hundreds, and sometimes even thousands, of users and puts the burden on technology (with resources supporting the process). Based on my experience, this support can be reduced to as little as a quarter or even to half of resource initially required. This is effective as users generally don’t like tagging content, and more often than not, they don’t understand the benefits of doing so.  As Don pointed out in his blog, it is a time-consuming process­­­­­­ for users to assume.

So, here is a recipe for steps to help you take advantage of automation:

1. Build a Taxonomy

With the BA insight AutoClassifier, the suggestions feature helps you automatically build out your existing taxonomy based on analysing content.  For example, if you have a medical taxonomy but are not sure which other terms to use in the taxonomy, the suggestions feature helps build it out based on an analysis of your existing content. This is a perfect example of starting small, building it up, and analysing what you have to enable you to grow. It takes away all of the hard work and manual effort.

step one

2. Tag your Content

Manual tagging just doesn’t work. Users don’t like doing it, and if they do it too often, they will simply pick the first item in the drop down or even worse, they may just pick something at random that isn’t necessary relevant.

Why not remove this impact on your users’ time and eliminate the human error element by automating the process?  Using text-based and rules-driven analytics, the AutoClassifier automatically generates metadata for findability so you don’t have to.

Through the BA Insight Connectors, you can even classify content that is stored externally to SharePoint and resides in other enterprise systems.

3. Provide Refinement Options

SharePoint automatically assigns metadata such as name, modified by, modified date, document type, etc., as seen below.

step two refinement options

However, is this really enough? There needs to be sufficient metadata to drive an internet-like search and refine experience which is critical in helping users quickly find relevant content.  Think about classifying content by location, office, department, content type, or even content source by connecting to external systems. Doing so will enable more relevant results, and if users want to refine their results further, they simply use the search refiners.

step three

The BA Insight Visual Refiners are a set of controls for drilldown, refinement, and content exploration that can be very helpful, even if you have not automated your tagging.

4. Use ‘Intelligent’ Tagging

The main purpose of metadata is to improve users’ search experience and enable them to find relevant information quickly.  That said, more often than not, I have seen automated metadata solutions tag content simply because a word that appears on a page matches the metadata tag. The consequence of this is that the word may appear hundreds of times and not provide any relevancy, or maybe even worse, appear once on page 203 of a 300-page document. This document could then be returned higher in a search result than a document that is actually relevant to the user’s search query.

Experience has shown me that classification of content (i.e. tagging content with metadata) should be based on what the content is really about rather than tagging a term to that document just because a word appears within the document. The term scoring rules feature in the BA Insight AutoClassifer provides exactly this and more.

5. Make Metadata Management an Ongoing Process

Finally, managing metadata doesn’t always have a defined start date, and it most certainly should never have an end date. It should be seen as an ongoing process.  Similar to having a garden, you don’t plant trees and flowers and expect your garden to look lovely all year round. It requires attention and nurturing – and the same is true of metadata.  You need to make sure it’s adaptable and flexible.  When your business changes and grows, so should your taxonomy and metadata.  Your data will change, business vocabulary and acronyms will change, and as a result new terms will need to be added, branches of your taxonomy will need to grow, and content will need to be retagged.

Metadata Management Requires Dedication

Based on the steps described, it is clear that managing metadata does require planning and dedication. However, automation will simplify the process, make it more accurate, eliminate user frustration and reduce the time needed to devote to it.  With some simple upfront planning, the correct people, and a powerful and easy to use auto-classification engine, the age old “search doesn’t work” will be a thing of the past, replaced with an intranet that does a pretty darn good job at surfacing the relevant search results that users are seeking.

This entry was posted in Blog and tagged Metadata, Taxonomies, Visual Refiners.
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Perspectives from our CEO,
Massood Zarrabian

Organizations have long been struggling with how to make knowledge assets available to employees, partners, and customers. Although there have been major technological advances in how this information is captured and made available over the past two decades, these have mostly been around a single business process. For example, when I joined Servicesoft, we were pioneering the idea of using search and classification engines to help transfer information to customers as part of the emerging eService market. At OutStart, we initiated the idea of objectifying learning and making the development of learning component-based so that it could be consumed via a “just-in-time” model. This meant that learners interacted only with learning objects that helped them increase their knowledge, and therefore their value, to the organization. In the last decade, another silo of information capture has emerged in the form of Social Business Software, making it easier than ever to capture nuggets of knowledge that can help others.  The interesting dynamic in all of this is that there are large investments being made to capture information and knowledge assets, but very little of it is actually accessible by employees or customers.

In the ‘90s, multiple software vendors tried to address the issue of information access by providing software to implement portals, whether they were used for helpdesk integration, customer support, intranets, or R&D to help with the collaboration and reuse of IP.  As the technology evolved and search engines and appliances became available, the portals were replaced with implementations of enterprise search. The problem with this approach is that it views the search engine as a ‘one size fits all’ solution, as opposed to viewing it as an enabling technology that helps organizations address a business issue. Failed enterprise search projects became the norm as companies tried, and continue trying, to resolve their information access challenges by implementing new search appliances while they still have underlying issues around integration with other systems, classification and tagging, and a sub-par user experience.

I joined BA Insight because I saw an immense opportunity to transform the way enterprise search is being implemented.  I am sure you know that the amount of content that is being generated is growing exponentially across an increasing number of sources, and the inability to find the information assets our people need is costing us billions of dollars in lost productivity while leading to low morale and customer dissatisfaction.

When I evaluated the opportunity at BA Insight, I found the company to be uniquely positioned to provide a new approach to the unification of information that stops the pattern of enterprise search failures.  We do this by transforming SharePoint, which has become ubiquitous across enterprises, into a unified information access platform that enables fast implementation of search-driven applications at a fraction of the cost of other options while de-risking search projects.

There are many notable and successful search-driven applications available on the Consumer Internet. Many are ‘killer apps’, and as a class they have fundamentally changed the way people interact with information.  However, in comparison, corporate Intranets, customer support portals, helpdesk applications or knowledge management solutions don’t come close to being killer apps, nor do they provide a remarkable user experience.

I found it intriguing that BA Insight has the technology, people, and partners to help catapult enterprise search to the next level.  We replace a people-intensive, SI-oriented approach to implementation with a technology-based approach that is lower cost, lower risk, easier to implement, and easier to upgrade. We do the heavy lifting to make our products work with different versions of SharePoint as well as various versions of other software applications that exist within a customer’s infrastructure.  We automate how content is tagged to improve findability and also provide out of the box capabilities to improve the user experience with how information is found and accessed.

I believe that in order for a company to be wildly successful, it must demonstrate the following five important attributes:

First is customer-centricity. Customers put their trust in startups with a vision, and we must partner with them to make sure they succeed. I am so proud of all of the customers I have had the honor of serving, as well as their achievements, and I consider it the cornerstone of my past success and BA Insight’s future success.

Second is our team. Our people have the experience and the desire to help our customers implement and deploy incredibly powerful applications. We want to help our customers build killer apps, as opposed to search portals. This is a team of high energy, committed, customer-centric experts who have embraced the idea that search-driven applications could be a lot better and are working to change how they get implemented.  I am fortunate enough to have become part of the BA Insight team and am so proud of everyone who works here. In a short period of time, we have made incredible progress on many fronts and I feel strongly that everyone’s loyalty and belief in the company will continue to provide an incredible depth for us and help our customers transform how they work with search technology.

Third is the technology. We have a broad set of capabilities that extend the value of existing SharePoint investments, so we eliminate the need to change the underlying infrastructure, saving a lot of time and money.  We have over 90 out of the box connectors, a world class auto-tagging engine for content within and outside of SharePoint, visual refiners to let users drill down and find information quickly, an active workspace with content assembly, and document preview capabilities.  We also provide a lot of flexibility in how our technology can be implemented.  Our full platform, for example, is particularly well-suited for new projects.  On the other hand, if search-driven applications have already been implemented within an organization, then components of our platform can be leveraged to augment the existing technology to improve results.

Fourth is to be financially responsible. Company success is about investment and return on that investment, and it needs to be measured in two fronts:

    1. ROI, which is the pure quantitative and financial analysis, often measured as productivity gains.
    2. My preferred approach is return on value (ROV), which is qualitative and focused on items such as customer loyalty, employee morale, better decision-making, and the ability to find information faster to increase customer responsiveness. Many of these things impact productivity and are therefore ROI, but they aren’t often measured and are therefore difficult to quantify. Isn’t the impact of finding the right knowledge to be able to do one’s job priceless? If we are smart about how we invest our time, money, and energy based on return on value, then we will naturally bring tremendous value to our customers and market and end up as a growing, profitable company that is resilient through the ups and downs of the economy and market.

And fifth is promoting a strong work/life balance. Work is important, but we cannot forget our families and shouldn’t compromise being with them due to office pressures.  For a long period of time I was a workaholic, but after my first son was born I committed to change. Over the years I have done my best to practice what I preach, successfully balancing work and family life, and I encourage our employees to do the same. I enjoy nothing more than spending time with my incredible wife and our great boys.

These attributes are prevalent at BA Insight, and I am very enthusiastic about the opportunities that lie ahead.  I am extremely confident that we are well positioned to enable the future of unified information access as we help visionary organizations around the world realize the value of the collective intelligence that is being captured every day within the massive volumes of content they produce.

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