We interviewed Chris Riley, Vice President of Product Marketing for Pingar at the SharePoint Conference, 2012, held in Las Vegas, NV in the U.S. Pingar provides an automated system that their customers use to automatically tag documents, lists, and other data assets stored in Microsoft® SharePoint® with the metadata required for very fast search and identification of information, as required.
Talking-SharePoint: “The question, Chris, is, ‘well we’ve heard a lot about the real value of tagging (and the real value of taxonomy) as the fact that [tagging] exposes data to users searching through SharePoint. Is there a way to translate this benefit into saving money, if we look at it from an enterprise business perspective?’”
Chris Riley: “I wouldn’t start with the search, actually. I would go one step before that, and start with user adoption. Because that’s the first immediate benefit. . . Users hate entering key words, and getting a user to do it, well, they will do it at the beginning, maybe, or ‘kinda’, but they are never really consistent about it. This is a huge risk [for them], because, as we know from a compliance perspective, and [from what we know about] adoption, most projects fail because of people, not because of technology. So [the job, for us,] is to make it easier for them by automatically entering the key words, together with a short review process, and, thereby eliminating that human step of manually tagging data.”
“Now, the ROI there is that you’ve increased the value, there, of your investment in SharePoint. [In fact,] you’ve increased your [rate of user] adoption. The money that you’ve put into deploying this massive [SharePoint] system is better actualized.”
“Next is search, and, with search it’s one of those things where there is the immediate value, which is (and AIIM has a statistic on this) [a reduction in the] cost of finding a document. ‘How much does it cost you to find a document?’ There are a lot of interesting studies on how to do [this type of analysis]. It may be hard to really quantify that, but there is no doubt that ‘time is money’. And if your knowledge workers are spending more time searching than they are doing your job, then it’s time wasted.”
“So, if they can get to their information faster as the result of our refiners and better keywords, then, obviously, there will be a savings over time. But there is also the matter of the risk savings, being ready for litigation. No one wants to have to deal with a law suit. But the difference between a company that has prepared for a lawsuit, and one that has not done this preparation, expressed in financial cost, is a matter of, potentially, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, or dollars.”
Talking-SharePoint: “Now, is there anything specially about SharePoint, as a platform, that lends itself, particularly, to this type of application? You’ve started off by getting us on to adoption, which we think is a really good place to go, and, thanks for that. So, if we hear you correctly, then Pingar works on a dual task with regard to an adoption objective, to offload the otherwise cumbersome process of tagging from users to an automated system so users accept the tagging process, and, further, to provide users with a compelling reason to adopt SharePoint, itself. Is this correct?”
Chris Riley: “Oh, absolutely. What you will find in a lot of companies is (this goes back to when I was doing SharePoint consulting) that most people will complain, [with regard to SharePoint], that the technology is not doing it’s job. But when you really start digging you find out that it’s the organization that’s not doing their job. They’re not planning, or they’re not preparing, right? So when [an organization] complains about SharePoint not being successful, they are usually saying that ‘we did not deploy this correctly’, or that ‘we did not do this correctly’
While not covered in this interview, Chris’ point, here, provides a perfect segue into the SharePoint training imperative, which is where Rehmani Consulting, Inc, with our SharePoint-Videos Collection of Video Training Content for SharePoint, and our VisualSP™help system can deliver substantial additional savings to users by further optimizing adoption efforts. We plan on exploring this point further in a follow-on post on automated solutions, including Pingar, for metadata tagging
Chris Riley: “The information architecture, how SharePoint works, has never changed. It’s always a matter of lists, libraries, site collections, sites and so forth. That consistency makes it very easy to scale SharePoint. I call SharePoint ‘a bag of tricks’. You need to make SharePoint do what you want it to do. And having these third party tools like Pingar, helps you get there faster. It’s not a matter of ‘re-inventing the wheel’ and doing anything special.”
“So strengthening your ability to hasten user adoption [of both tagging, and, at the macro level, SharePoint, itself], gives you a very strong return on your investment.”
“As Microsoft has published, approximately 85% of all enterprise businesses have SharePoint, but not all 85% are using it. Why is that?”
Talking-SharePoint: “Right. Now how does the process of automatically tagging data, as Pingar does it, work with the Term Store?”
Chris Riley: “The content that we extract from documents is added to a Term Store column. So it’s added to MMS [Managed Metadata Services] in Term Store, which means that you can do all of this neat stuff [facilitated by the MMS in SharePoint] with the data that we extract, regardless of whether you use an existing column or a new column that you’ve created with Pingar. So that’s how we populate data. We use MMS.”
“But if you already have a taxonomy, or you already have a folksonomy, taxonomy, managed metadata setup, and you want to use those terms as your dictionary, and match to them, we can match to that existing set of terms.”
Talking-SharePoint: “So you can work with an existing taxonomy”
Chris Riley: “Absolutely. In compliance [applications] you have to do that. You can’t use just any term that comes out of the document, you have to use specific terms [already included in an approved taxonomy].”
Talking-SharePoint: “Thank you for that information. To summarize, it sounds as if some of the people that you are talking to, some of the prospects, really can’t get a handle, tangibly, on how much it’s costing them to go about this task of identifying documents, identifying items in lists, we would imagine, ‘on the fly.’ And it sounds like a lot of these businesses are in heavily regulated industries. Is that accurate?”
Chris Riley: “Yes, that is very common.”
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