Enterprise Search, “Findability” and Document Imaging

Enterprise search has been getting a lot of play lately, and for good reason. AIIM is about to publish its Market Intelligence Report on Findability and, among the findings, reported that 49% of survey respondents “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that it is a difficult and time consuming process to find the information they need to do their job. And, 69% of respondents believe that only 50% or less of their organization’s information is searchable online.

Considering that the Internet and Google have spoiled us to the point that we expect to be able to find information on anything within seconds, enterprise search is clearly a technology issue that is rising on the priority list of IT departments. But, you may ask, enterprise search technology pertains to electronic information…so how does this relate to document imaging?

Well, we believe that the rising focus on enterprise search will result in a growing demand for front-office document capture and imaging. In today’s world, the vast majority of paper documents are still scanned using centralized and/or production procedures – a back-office function. The scanning is done at the end of the business process and is driven primarily by archiving, records management, legal, or storage space saving initiatives.

Enterprise search -- and the above mentioned pain of employees need to find the information needed to do their job – is driving the need to capture these paper documents earlier on in business processes and document workflows. Paper is not going away and the information that resides on paper is just as important to employees as electronic information. The solution to this is giving front-office workers the capability to scan paper documents – and make them searchable – as soon as they enter into an organization.

As we have discussed numerous times, scanning hardware is already available to front-office workers through MFPs, networked scanners and desktop scanners. But simply scanning a document and saving it as a PDF to a network drive only moves the “findability” problem from a stack of paper to the “digital landfill”. Empower your users to make scanned documents searchable, however, and you will be contributing to an enterprise search solution.

Among many considerations, there are two core features that you should be looking for in document imaging software to help get paper-based information into searchable form:

• OCR – Optical character recognition technology – available either at the scanning device or at the desktop following scanning – will identify characters on the scanned document and convert them to a computer language that can be accessed by search technology.
• Indexing/Metadata Entry – The document imaging software should either give users the ability to add metadata and taxonomy to documents (such as document types, subjects, client codes, keywords, etc.), and/or add that metadata automatically to scanned documents (such as date, the person who scanned the document, etc.). With this metadata stored as an XML file in conjunction with the scanned image, the document is easily located by search technology.

If you can reach a point where information from both electronic and paper-based sources is searchable online, the “findability” problem will start to lessen.

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