publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/550988
ILTA WHITE PAPER: JULY 2015 WWW.ILTANET.ORG SUPPORT THE DEVICES YOU USE We no longer live in a world where you can offer only on-premise solutions. In 2014, Gartner found that over 40 percent of U.S. employees working for large enterprises are using personally owned mobile devices for work. Adding in smaller businesses and company-issued mobile devices, over half of all U.S. employees are using a mobile phone or tablet to do some work. Implementing a desktop-only search strategy solves only part of the problem and will ultimately lead to user dissatisfaction. To implement a successful cross-device search strategy, you must first understand what devices your employees are using and then extend search support to those devices. Mobile devices are typically used when timeliness is of the essence, so make sure that document search is a planned part of your mobile strategy. EVALUATE YOUR TAXONOMIES Imagine walking into a library with the goal of finding George Orwell's 1984. You would go to the fiction area, walk along the rows organized alphabetically by author, find the one containing "Orwell" and pull the book off the shelf. Now imagine that instead of alphabetically by author, the books were organized by the color and size of their cover. How would you find the book? Chances 6 7 SEVEN WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR ENTERPRISE SEARCH DO NOT REQUIRE MULTIPLE SEARCHES TO FIND ONE DOCUMENT We all know how this goes: You need to find a document, but where did you save it? Is it in your ECM, your email inbox or did you save it directly to your computer? Your employees are more likely to abandon a search effort if they must search across multiple repositories or systems to find the desired result. Organizations have two options when dealing with this issue: • Implement a strict information governance plan and limit all data storage to a single repository • Offer a federated search across multiple repositories 4 ALLOW SEARCH RESULTS TO BE ACTIONED If your employees find but cannot action documents directly or need to go through multiple steps to access them, their tendency to drop the search result increases. Get to know what your employees are doing once they have found the correct document(s). Are they editing, emailing or downloading them? Once you know how your users use their search results, add quick link functionalities. SharePoint search, for example, allows users to hover over search results and receive a list of actions they can take directly on the results. Third-party add-ons can help you leverage native ECM functionalities directly from SharePoint search results. 5 43