* Adopt tricks from document management systems
I hate to lose things. I especially hate to lose files, because I can see the network-attached storage device holding the files from my desk. But wasting time searching for files isn’t just a personal problem, as a recent survey of 1,000 middle managers in large companies found (see “Most manager’s info searches are useless”).
According to that Network World story, “Accenture found managers spend as long as two hours a day searching for information and more than half of the data they find has no value to them.”
While the survey was of larger companies, small companies suffer the same problem. So let’s learn from big companies’ mistakes and work smarter. After all, small company workers don’t have two hours a day to waste either.
Last August, I talked about some of the new search software and appliances available to small businesses, “Find that file fast”. Let’s look at the other end of the equation and examine what companies do before data is stored to facilitate retrieval.
Smaller companies have one advantage in searching, because they have fewer in-house storage locations to search. Over half of the big company managers reported checking multiple storage locations during searches. Companies with only two or three data storage locations narrow their search options immediately.
There are two major ways to store files for better retrieval. You can either use a detailed folder architecture, such as Projects/Acme/Proposals, or label each file with keywords like Acme and Proposal and dump them into catch-all folders. Both options are good, but users can screw up both. Prepare to work hard to get better results no matter which direction you take, but chances are you can’t do a worse job than you are doing now.
Most people use the folder method, spurred on by Microsoft’s My Documents default organization. The problems appear when you go to save a file … Do you put it in Acme or in Proposals? Both choices work, depending on your organization theme. But since you have no easy way to link documents in Proposals back to associated documents under Acme, I think it’s time to try something new.
The second problem with the My Documents folder hierarchy? By default, it puts all the files on PCs where only one person has easy access. You can redirect the My Documents folder to shared network storage, but few people do that before the user starts filling up their hard disk with files.
As desktop search tools grew, people started ignoring hierarchical file structures and just dumped files into a folder. Several versions earlier, Microsoft Windows started choking if there were more than 512 files in a folder, but those days are past. You can dump thousands of files in a folder and still scan the directory quickly.
But once you get several thousand files in a folder, casual searches start acting like Web searches as too many results overwhelm you. When users get 20 files as a search result, they’ll look at them. When they get 200 or 2,000, they curse and quit
Back in the 1980s, when “Document Management” systems burst onto the scene with self-feeding scanners and graphical interfaces, user training took days and sometimes weeks. Part of the blame belongs to poorly written software, but most of the training reinforced the need to label each scanned document before saving it. Scanners processed hundreds of papers per hour, but the automatically assigned names, such as SCAN12998 and D-19AA74-3 meant nothing to real people. The only way to know which of those documents was the Acme Proposal, and which was a purchase order for toilet paper, was to label each scanned document using an organized naming convention. Fields such as customer:ACME and type:Proposal were stamped onto the files during processing so the rudimentary search engines could index only those special fields use that information to retrieve the files.
Tagging files works better than trusting users to search thoroughly. Design a tagging structure and add these keywords into your documents before storage. You may start with only a customer name (ACME) and document type (proposal). You may add the date. You may add the author name. You may add the department name (sales). When you decide on a keyword structure and follow it, your search software will do a much better job finding the files you need.
Most files stay within the company, so you don’t have to worry about mailing letters with odd keywords stamped on the page. Once employees know and use the keywords, they’ll remember to erase the keywords before printing and mailing the documents at least half the time (and about 80% of the time with training).
The combination of a few keywords, along with your search software’s ability to search every word in the document, greatly increases the success rate of your results. If you use software that can process just the results found in a previous search, you can quickly narrow down the results list to a few pertinent documents.
You can start this type of keyword system anytime just by adding unique keywords to documents. The more keywords the more success, but starting today is better than cursing the search results you get tomorrow.
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