Biographical Information

Articles by Martin Garland

Metadata-Enabled Hybrid Search as the Foundation for Information Governance

The cloud delivers both benefits and challenges. Offering cost reductions, ubiquitous access, and unlimited storage, the cloud has changed the way companies do business. Internal issues, such as search effectiveness, security, compliance, and information governance, need to be addressed. While SharePoint on-premises feels familiar, cloud-based solutions may not be traditional or proven…

Risk Reduction and Innovation Creation

In many organizations, a proactive approach to managing unstructured and semi-structured content has never received the necessary focus or relative importance from within the IT and business infrastructure. Enterprise content management, the phrase of the day in 2000, has lost its luster and has failed to keep up with technology. Knowledge management, once all the rage, is now coming into vogue again. A half-hearted approach to managing content is no longer a viable option, due to unmitigated content growth and the fact that 80% of business decisions are made using unstructured content. . .

Don’t Enhance SharePoint
Transform It Through Metadata

SharePoint has matured over the past 13 years. What has changed? Enterprises are still affected by a volatile economy, burgeoning regulatory requirements and the overall challenge to do more with less. This is also evident in organizations' use of SharePoint. Results from a Concept Searching survey found SharePoint is no longer relegated to just a departmental solution or a collaboration platform. Enterprises today face very serious challenges in compliance, potential data breaches and the spiraling costs and frequency of eDiscovery and litigation support. . . .

Can Intelligent Search Solve Information Governance Challenges?

Intelligent search is a primary component in information governance and should be treated as a core infrastructure requirement, driven by executive management. When effective, intelligent search forms the basis of improved organizational performance and touches discrete applications that together meet the tactical objectives of an overarching information governance strategy. When search doesn't work, information governance as a whole is undermined and can negate any benefits, affecting the ability to achieve organizational objectives. Without risk assessment and policies that apply to enterprise search, a Pandora's box of problems is opened. . . .

Solving the Inadequacies and Failures in Enterprise Search

The inability to identify the value in unstructured content is the primary challenge in any application that requires the use of metadata. If you aren't managing it, you won't find it. At the most basic level, enterprise search has become inadequate. Bells and whistles abound but the unsolved problem still exists. Search cannot find and deliver relevant information in the right context, at the right time. This laissez-faire approach, starting with executive management on down, illustrates the inability of organizations to elevate search to a key component and critical enabler for improving business outcomes. An information governance approach that creates the infrastructure framework to encompass automated intelligent metadata generation, auto-classification, and the use of goal- and mission-aligned taxonomies is required. . . .

Intelligent Metadata Enabled Solutions

For the most part, gone are the days when SharePoint was a good choice to enable a department to share its documents and have a single point of access to information. As SharePoint has matured, so has the marketplace, and enterprise expectations of SharePoint have also changed. New challenges such as records management, security, migration and the cloud have changed the landscape. With regulatory requirements surrounding privacy, security and compliance increasing, the stakes are much higher. With unstructured data increasing at an average annual growth rate of 62%, search is inadequate and has made volumes of content unusable for applications, such as text analytics and collaboration. . . .

SharePoint Information Governance That Works

Every organization is unique in its requirements and approach to information governance. These variations increase as SharePoint becomes prolific in organizations of all sizes. Despite the rapid adoption of SharePoint, it has traditionally been used to solve collaboration, content and records management challenges at the departmental level, outside the view and control of a corporate IT function. While this gives departments control of their content. . . .

KMWorld Hall of Distinction 2012: Concept Searching

Enhancing SharePoint Through Information Governance

According to Microsoft, every day for the past five years 20,000 new SharePoint users have been added. As one of the most popular departmental content management solutions, SharePoint silos are now littering the organizational landscape. . . .

The Case for "Going Native"

Recent reports suggest that taxonomy management and auto-classification is one of the top five most popular third-party add-ons for SharePoint 2010. A part of any strategic decision to standardize on SharePoint 2010 is to take full advantage of the Term Store Management Tool—Microsoft's initial building block to enable organizations to natively build taxonomy structures and facilitate the management of large amounts of content—much of which is strategic or of high value to the organization. . . .