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CONTENT MANAGEMENT
continued...
How, then, do
you address
potential
resistance
around
tagging
things with
metadata?
the idea that one can do that innovation
while the content remains in other systems,
undisturbed. This is the idea that one group
could utilise that data in a wholly different
way to how others are using the same
data in another system, allowing different
groups to be doing that simultaneously
based on their needs, without incurring all
of that migration and change management
on a large scale.”
Metadata layer
M-files eliminates many of the problems
highlighted above through a metadata
layer. Most ECM systems use a location-
based paradigm for storing documents
– the idea that you put something in a
folder to classify it, a ‘customer’ folder or a
‘project’ folder or a ‘contracts waiting for
review’ folder.
Milliken points out that systems of this
nature are flawed because the organisation
of folders and files is so subjective. “Do
you have marketing, sales, administration,
and then under those North America,
Europe and Asia? Or do you have North
America and then marketing and sales
under that? It’s a very subjective choice
and each company really does things
differently, each individual even. Then,
you’ve got to teach people that subjective
thing and that's what we believe leads
to imprecision and dark data. If I think
this should be in the customer folder but
somebody else thinks it should be in the
project folder, where is it? And what if it’s
in different systems? Then, what about if
it needs to be in more than one place, if it
needs to be in both the project folder and
the customer folder?”
Milliken says that this is where context
and M-Files’ metadata-driven approach
brings benefits. By adding tags, in this case
‘customer’ and ‘project’, the document
can show up in more than one place. “We
often use the analogy of the iPhone. When
you put music on your iPhone, it shows up
by genre or artist or album or date, but it is
still only one piece of music,” he said.
If over time, the document becomes
associated with another project or
customer you just add their name as a tag.
It is completely dynamic and completely
objective.
No silver bullet
Milliken admits that M-files’ approach is
not a silver bullet. There are still aspects of
it that people might find fault with, such as
the need to add metadata.
“The area where there might be some
overhead is adding the metadata. How does
the metadata get defined? You could argue
that some people might think ‘I don't want
to tag the things’, which is why in the past
they would just put things into a network
shared drive without going into the ECM
system – because they could just throw it in
there. Then you don’t remember where you
put it and nobody else can find it.”
How, then, do you address potential
resistance around tagging things with
metadata?
Traditionally creating the metadata
has been done by manually tagging
a document or using semi-automated
methods like scanning and OCRing content
and identifying a part number within
a document or reading a barcode and
classifying it on that basis.
