© Concept Searching 2015

Metadata Matters – eDiscovery at

Nottinghamshire County Council

John Challis

Founder and CEO/CTO

Concept Searching

john@conceptsearching.com

Twitter @conceptsearch

Lesley Holmes

Information Manager

Nottinghamshire County Council

lesley.holmes@nottscc.gov.uk

Twitter @NottsCC

© Concept Searching 2015

Expert Speakers

Lesley Holmes – Information Manager at Nottinghamshire

County Council An experienced information and content

management specialist with a background in the delivery of front

line public sector services. Also conversant with the value and

use of business intelligence to drive service improvement and

profitability. Manager of multi-disciplinary teams delivering projects

and programmes across a wide range of services.

John Challis – Founder and CEO/CTO of Concept Searching

is an experienced entrepreneur, having had success with several

previous ventures involving the management of unstructured

data. He is the originator of the company’s compound term

processing technology and is the driving force behind the product

strategy.

© Concept Searching 2015

Agenda

• Business and Technology Problems

• Challenge

• Solution

• Benefits

• What’s coming up

© Concept Searching 2015

• Company founded in 2002

• Product launched in 2003

• Focus on management of structured and unstructured information

• Technology Platform

• Delivered as a web service

• Automatic concept identification, content tagging,

auto-classification, and taxonomy management

• Only statistical vendor that can extract conceptual metadata

• 8 years KMWorld ‘100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management’

• 7 years KMWorld ‘Trend Setting Product’

• Authority to operate enterprise wide US Air Force, enterprise wide

NETCON US Army, and Canadian SLSA

• Locations: US, UK, and South Africa

• Client base: Fortune 500/1000 organizations

• Microsoft Gold Certification in Application Development

• Microsoft Business-Critical SharePoint program partner

• Smart Content Framework™ for information governance comprising

• conceptClassifier for SharePoint and conceptClassifier for Office 365

• Concept Searching Technology Platform and conceptClassifier Platform

• Add on – conceptTaxonomyWorkflow and conceptClassifier for OneDrive for Business

The Global Leader in

Managed Metadata Solutions

© Concept Searching 2015

Nottinghamshire County Council

Search, Auto-tagging, eDiscovery,

and Records Management Delivering

Legal Compliance and Reduced Risk

© Concept Searching 2015

The Business Problem

• Records and content lifecycle management is

not typically integrated into an overall

information governance plan

• Due to the explosive growth of unstructured

data, changing and new government and

industry requirements, organizations must track

and be accountable for

• All formats of unstructured and semi-

structured content

• Proactive preparation for compliance

mandates and unexpected litigation

• Managing all data assets from cradle to

grave

• Lack of a proactive approach and the

development of an Enterprise Metadata

Repository to enforce policy across the

organization and provide for metadata re-use

• Less than 50% of content is correctly indexed,

meta tagged, or efficiently searchable (IDC)

• 60% of documents are obsolete (eLaw)

• 50% of documents are duplicates (Equivio)

What are the repercussions?

• Fines – government or industry

• Sanctions

• Litigation

• Remediation

• Loss of brand or trust

© Concept Searching 2015

A manual metadata approach will fail 95%+ of the time

Issue Organizational Impact

Inconsistent

Less than 50% of content is correctly indexed, meta-tagged or

efficiently searchable rendering it unusable to the organization (IDC)

Subjective Highly trained information specialists will agree on meta tags between

33%-50% of the time (C. Cleverdon)

Cumbersome – expensive

Average cost of manually tagging one item runs from $4 - $7 per

document and does not factor in the accuracy of the meta tags nor the

repercussions from mistagged content (Hoovers)

Malicious compliance End users select first value in list

(Perspectives on Metadata, Sarah Courier)

No perceived value for end user

What’s in it for me? End user creates document, does not see value

for organization nor risks associated with litigation and

non-conformance to policies

What have you seen Metadata will continue to be a problem due to inconsistent human

behavior

The Technology Problem

© Concept Searching 2015

The Technology Solution

• Remains unique in the industry

• Ability to identify and correctly weight

multi-word concepts in unstructured text

8

Concept Searching

provides Automatic

Concept Term Extraction

Triple

Baseball

Three

Heart

Organ

Center

Bypass

Highway

Avoid

© Concept Searching 2015

The County Council

• Nottinghamshire County Council is the 9th largest local authority in

the UK employing 18,000 people, including those employed in

schools

• The Council administers an annual budget of £504 million to provide

cost effective public services to over 796,200 people in the county

• The Council provides over 300 services to its citizens ranging from

Social Care to Highways Maintenance

© Concept Searching 2015

Situation

• Significant number and diversity of information assets that support

the delivery of over 300 discrete services

• To do this the Council manages in excess of 200TB of electronic

information on a day to day basis plus an equivalent volume of

physical information.

• Much of the information we hold is on line of business systems

and very structured, but about 40% is held in unstructured

repositories

© Concept Searching 2015

Challenge

• Good information management policies were in place, but no

consistent policy adoption

• No tagging was used for unstructured information at all and no

defined structure

• Reduction in staff numbers meant content owners were leaving

behind a legacy of unmanaged, unsearchable content

• Repositories had grown through decentralised IT function and silo

approach to the delivery of services

© Concept Searching 2015

Solution

• Enterprise technology infrastructure using unique ‘compound term

processing’ – the ability to capture concepts within unstructured

content

• Built the infrastructure to enable auto-tagging based on a

Function/Activity/Task file plan in SharePoint 2010 and the

centralised management of the taxonomies

• conceptSearch, conceptTaxonomyManager,

conceptClassifier for SharePoint, and conceptTaxonomyWorkflow

© Concept Searching 2015

Auto-tagging in Action

© Concept Searching 2015

Enhanced SharePoint Search in Action

© Concept Searching 2015

“Now we can take the content the council employees

create and make it findable, rather than relying on the

users to make it findable.” Lesley Holmes, Information Manager

Nottinghamshire County Council

© Concept Searching 2015

Benefits

• Why we purchased conceptSearch

• Flexibility of the system

• Accessibility – information is available to all, based on security

permissions

• Document and records lifecycle management – create, use,

share, retain and dispose

• How we are looking to leverage our investment

• Simplification of ICT management – fewer servers, more

effective back up regime

• Simplified permissions models

• Legal compliance and the facility for legal hold

• eDiscovery – narrowing the review requirements

• Time and cost savings

• Better Information for decisions – can see the whole picture

© Concept Searching 2015

Summary and Takeaways

Best Practices

• Use tools to tag and auto-classify content

to one or more taxonomies • Elimination of end user tagging

• Use workflow to automatically declare

documents of record, either in-place or

route to the records management

application

• Clean up your content • 69% of an organization’s content can

and should be deleted (CGOC 2012)

• Avoid over preservation

• Develop a sound records management

approach to encompass the entire

lifecycle of content

• Involve business professionals, not just IT

• Do not rely on users to change their

behaviour

What else can you Improve?

• Relevance and precision in search

• Enterprise content management

• Identification of assets for eDiscovery

and litigation preparedness

• Identification of secure (PII, PHI) or

confidential information, remove from

search, and prevent portability

• Records management and compliance

• Collaboration and social tagging

• Intelligent migration

• Text analytics

© Concept Searching 2015

Metadata Matters – External Self-serve Portal at Moffitt Cancer Center

with guest speaker David Stringfellow, Manager of Portal and Web Technologies, on March 10th,

11:30am – 12:15pm EDT

Metadata Matters – Eliminating Manual Tagging at AllRegs

with guest speaker Lynn Richmond, Product Manager, on April 14th, 11:30am – 12:15pm EDT

Metadata Matters – Collaboration, Search, and Information Governance at Brailsford & Dunlavey

with guest speakers Bart Hall, Director – Research and Methods, and Tim Presecky, Data Platforms

Coordinator, on May 27th, 11:30am – 12:15pm EDT

Metadata Matters – Focusing on Your Challenges

with guest speaker from Microsoft, on June 23rd, 11:30am – 12:15pm EDT

© Concept Searching 2015

Thank You

John Challis

Founder and CEO/CTO

Concept Searching

john@conceptsearching.com

Twitter @conceptsearch

Lesley Holmes

Information Manager

Nottinghamshire County Council

lesley.holmes@nottscc.gov.uk

Twitter @NottsCC