Author Archive

01: A New Look for a New Era

For more than two decades, ISYS has continued to invest and innovate in its core IP, in line with customer requirements. This has enabled our technology to work in the most demanding of business environments.

During that period, we have successfully moved beyond desktop search into developing and delivering high-performance solutions for business-critical applications such as virtual data aggregation, enterprise content management, text analytics, email archiving, e-discovery and data loss prevention. And with the launch of ISYS Document Filters 10.0, we’re enabling organisations to better leverage the value of their growing volumes of unstructured data in the world of ‘Big Data’.

Today, we’re proud to unveil our new identity, which we’ll be rolling out over the coming weeks. At the same time, we are developing a brand new website that is designed to provide a more engaging, informative and rewarding experience for prospects and customers alike.

After all, finding exactly the information you’re looking for (and being able to do something useful with it), should be as quick and painless as possible.

02: Embrace the revolution – Part 2

In my previous blog I talked about how enterprises need to be realistic about what information they can directly structure and organize – especially now that up to 90% of all content within an organization is unstructured.

Whilst watching a re-run recently of ‘Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’, it struck me that we are approaching a genuine watershed – a tipping point if you like – in relation to how organizations can, and ultimately must, respond to what I’d describe as the Third Information Age. 

If we turn the clock back, the First Information Age was arguably characterized by a relative scarcity of information for organizations, along with the technical challenges of capturing and using it.

In the (current) Second Age, we have witnessed the explosion of new digital media and content channels, platforms and devices. In this scenario, the challenge for organizations has been in trying to manage all of the huge volumes of unstructured information that are being generated and shared every single day.

But I believe a Third Age is now dawning. Here, organizations will acknowledge the ultimate futility of trying to manage what I’d term as escalating ‘information inflation’. Not simply the sheer volume and diversity of information being created, but the associated increase in human, technology and organizational costs of trying to manage what is essentially unmanageable.

A point is being reached where the costs of directly tackling this information inflation outweigh the business benefits.

Far better, smarter (and less costly) is to make information inflation irrelevant. Accept that your organization cannot ultimately keep up with the spread of unstructured information and instead focus resources on how best to intelligently search and extract what you need from the ‘chaos’.

The information genie is now well and truly out of the bottle and won’t go back in.

So, stop worrying about it and instead think about how your organization can turn the genie to your advantage.

03: Embrace the revolution – Part 1

As a child growing up in the 1970’s, content was a state of well-being. Eating, playing with friends and watching TV in the evenings.  

Fast forward 40 years and content has become something you create, view, buy, sell, download, modify, store and share. There’s a huge amount of it. It’s everywhere and everybody seems to be caught up in it. We are in the midst of an information explosion. Except this explosion is unique, because the effects are multiplying by the day.

For enterprises, trying to maintain some kind of coherent structure over their information is a huge and ongoing challenge. It takes time and can cost a lot of money.

But however well-organized and structured the information is, it is today only a small part of the total picture. Why? Because of user-generated content – the stuff that individuals within (and outside) your enterprise create, duplicate and share every single day.

It is by definition unstructured. The outcome of behaviours, processes and activities that are often meant to foster creativity and add value. But which inevitably stretch and evolve established information boundaries and taxonomies.

Add to that the proliferation of storage locations beyond the desktop (e.g. tablets, phones, USB drives) and the issue of information ‘find-ability’ becomes increasingly acute. Think of this as finding precisely the needle you need in a haystack that is growing exponentially.

As enterprises, we need to be realistic about what information we can directly structure and organise. The balance has shifted and up to 90% of all content today is unstructured.

Regardless of where it might reside, we need to be able to (virtually) aggregate content together in a way that allows us to be very precise about what we are seeking; and to do something meaningful with what we find.

The Scout Motto ‘Be prepared’ has never been more prescient. 

The revolution is already here, so embrace it and maybe even learn to love it.

Accept that you can’t store, structure and classify everything. Instead, use the right enterprise search technology to virtually aggregate all the critical sources of information you need to help enable more informed decision-making.

By doing so, you might not have to go through that physical (and very painful) legacy migration exercise you’d been planning.  

If that’s not an option, you can at least do it at your own pace, so that users aren’t affected by the move because they still have a uniform, single point of access – regardless of where the information really ‘lives’.

More on that in Part 2…