Investigate Or Investigated?
The Credit Crisis is Turbo-Charging Enterprise Search
At this moment, only two specialized applications in the enterprise search market exist that show growth potential: those that are used to investigate the fall-out of the credit crisis and those used by organizations as part of their defense against investigations that result from their activities in the banking and financial industry. Although most of the economy is reeling and IT budgets are being slashed, enterprise search applications are one of the few areas where organizations are allocating investment resources. Even if little budget exists for capital expenditures, most organizations involved in financial (and related) sectors realize that they must be prepared to cover the cost of managing documentation and information related to an investigation or lawsuit. High-quality enterprise search tools are proving to be the best value-adding resource for providing organizations capabilities for enhancing operational efficiency and ensuring procedural thoroughness.
Financial Crisis Factors
The following needs exist as a result of the current financial crisis and are a good framework with which to establish the appropriate criteria for viewing the importance of enterprise search and the benefits it provides as part of a comprehensive records management solution:
Finding specific information within huge, diverse archives. The greatest challenge faced by organizations is being able to adequately answer questions from regulators about what has been taking place across an organization’s operations and with its employees. Frequently, information about specific transaction types is requested under threat of punitive action. Determining where to search is a complex proposition; as such, there is often no choice but to have a specialist read all available information. This process is, of course, very expensive and can take a long time, which is an extra complication given the strict deadlines regulators impose for receiving information. Moreover, only the most advanced and fine-tuned search tools can handle the sticky problem of searching hidden databases and repositories.
Handling confidential information. Before information can be transferred to a third party, all confidential and "privileged" data must first be removed or made anonymous (by redaction). Special considerations must be paid when dealing with sensitive information such as social security numbers, employees’ medical files, correspondence between lawyer and client, confidential technical information from a supplier or customer and so on. But these considerations often are at odds with the need to conduct detailed searches through a lot of information while often not having a full picture of the type of data being searched for.
Accounting for investigative reach. Shareholders, affected large financial institutions and other involved organizations may file charges and claims. Opposing parties can legally request all potentially relevant information through a subpoena, which triggers a discovery process. This legal procedural framework is applicable to American companies as well as every organization that directly or indirectly conducts business in the United States with the affected parties.
Anticipating transparency and accountability’s evolution. Major legislative changes and stricter control systems will inevitably evolve and gain strength, forcing companies to conduct even more rigorous, regular and proactive internal investigations, deeper audits and risk analyses. Technology (particularly text mining) that helps process and analyze enormous amounts of information in a timely fashion will become a required tool of doing business.
Choosing The Right Enterprise Search Tools
In all the above-mentioned instances, tools, techniques and products from the enterprise search space can help an organization meet deadlines and save tremendous amounts of resources and money. However, not all enterprise search products will be suitable for use as an investigative or discovery toolset. A major separation can be seen in the marketplace.
On the one hand, there are the typical Web search engines that are used for Web portals and some in-house intranet search applications. These engines focus on finding the best results. On the other, advanced search and text-analytics tools are available that focus on the particular needs of the law enforcement, intelligence, security and compliance markets. These tools focus on finding everything that can potentially be relevant.
Vendors offering this second type of search technology are of the most interest to fraud investigators or lawyers because these professionals don’t just want the best documents, they want all possibly relevant documents. However, as logical as it may seem, this approach is not yet the industry standard; rather, many high-profile large-scale enterprise solution providers—while offering an array of exceptional technologies—dilute the overall effectiveness of their solutions by relying on inadequate Web search-type technologies to drive their product lines.
Finding What You Don’t Know You’re Looking For
As noted above, one of the key features that must be provided by enterprise search is the ability to find (potentially) relevant information among huge sets of data. But this challenge is further complicated by the fact that at the beginning of an investigation, investigators probably don’t know the full extent of the information for which they are looking. They may not know aliases, synonyms or code names, or they do not exactly know which companies, persons, account numbers or amounts must be searched for. Investigators using the right search tools can identify all these types of entities or properties according to their linguistic role and then classify them in a structured manner for presentation to the investigator, who can then quickly determine legitimate transactions from those that are suspect.
Moreover, targeted state-of-the-art search tools can be adapted very effectively to obtain new but essential insights necessary to progress through an investigation. The most advanced tools can do more than just perform plain (Boolean) word queries: they search according to complex patterns and characteristics, which provides better search results and deeper data analysis. Information that might otherwise remain hidden can be found and retrieved relatively easily.
The ability to find hidden information is also a factor in handling confidential data, such as medical records, social security numbers and so on. Investigators must take every precaution not to violate privacy rules, even though they may not know what information may actually be contained in the records through which they’re searching. The "old way" of hiring outside counsel to perform a linear legal review is proving to be cost prohibitive, particularly now that robust enterprise search tools are available. Auditors and in-house legal professionals are now realizing that with the right enterprise search tool, considerable parts of a legal review can be done automatically. With the addition of text mining and text-analytics tools (as well a multilanguage capabilities for international investigations), an early-case assessment can be made to estimate the real extent of the legal issues at hand, which can be an important feature when the parties want to work toward a quick settlement.
Tools To Enhance Enterprise Search
A particular problem exists in e-discovery when it comes to searching collections that are archived in proprietary silos such as common database and DBMS formats, MS Exchange servers, SharePoint repositories, Lotus Notes servers and many other content management and document management systems. Often it is not possible to full-text index the content of these repositories without writing a special script to cover all the particularities of the collection. Because every collection is different from others, properly indexing such collections is an expensive task. If the collection contains non-searchable PDFs, ZIPs or other data that cannot be searched, a strong chance exists that relevant information may
not be found and handed over to the opposing party during discovery. Traditional approaches to accessing data in such repositories have been to use available internal search tools and then export any relevant retrieved records and documents to a legal hold area (federation through the ATOM standard is a common example of this type of solution).