Designing Your Information Discovery
Content has little value if users cannot discover it and then work with it. This can vary from users actively searching for information they know they need as an input to their job function, to content users are unaware even exists but that contains information that a user would potentially find relevant. It can also include a librarian or records manager discovering content in response to a legal or regulatory case. Content discovery is a crucial aspect to your enterprise content management solution because it drives the content’s value to your organization by making it available to your users.
The chapters in this part look at different topics related to discovering content within your organization. I start with the concept of an enterprise search service you can provide to your users so they can find any relevant content they need to locate, a service that other content discovery features also depend on to crawl and index the corpus of content. From there, I discuss discovering content through social connections such as social tagging. Then I guide you through how to plan for electronic discovery and discovery case management to support formal and often regulatory-related content discovery requirements. Finally, I contrast content discovery with its counterpart: how to secure content to prevent unauthorized discovery.
As you consider the different information discovery techniques, remember that your ultimate goal is to facilitate users in their process to discover relevant information, while also preventing users from discovering or accessing content that is not appropriate to their role and job function. You build an effective information discovery solution by considering the user experience and paying attention to how you designed your information architecture to organize and classify the content. Your information architecture identifies relationships between content as well as other information, such as stages in the content’s life cycle. It also leads to search relevancy and the ability to refine search results, establishing enterprise search to provide the core technical components for information discovery, and the topic I look at first.