If you look under the hood of a document management system, you will find document indexing at the heart of it.The great promise of digital transformation does not just lie in the digital storage of large amounts of information. It resides in what the digital layer allows, what the physical layer could never do. In traditional archives, records were indexed by categories, but with countless limitations. Limits that only become apparent now that we know what is possible.
What is document indexing?
Document indexing is an information management system that identifies and records a number of specific attributes of a document in order to make its retrieval smoother, faster and easier. In other words, well-designed document indexing improves the retrieval and findability of documents in a document management system.
Depending on the use case, data points or indexing parameters can include a wide range of descriptive information and metadata. For example, accounting department documents can be indexed by invoice numbers, vendor names, issue date, etc. Similarly, an organization’s HR function files can be indexed by employee name, social security number, and other relevant information. The choice of indexing data points is usually determined by the probability of search queries posed by the end user.
The Importance of Document Indexing
Scanning and capturing paper documents is just the first step on the long road to digital transformation. The value of a digital document repository lies in the ease with which a user can find the information it contains. Document indexing is therefore an essential tool that makes a digital transformation truly powerful in the following way.
Win time
83% of employees have to recreate existing documents because they cannot find them in their company’s network. This is an amazing stat from The 2019 Intelligent Information Management Benchmark report.
In addition to the need to recreate lost documents, the time wasted recovering information accumulates invisibly across the enterprise. Intelligent document indexing is essential to exploit digitized data. And this is reflected in the number of working hours saved.
Money savings
The time wasted finding and recreating lost documents translates itself into money. However, the risk of losing an important document can itself be costly. Especially when compared to traditional paper-based documentation processes, well-digitally indexed documents reduce operating costs and mitigate the unpredictable risks of human error.
Facilitate compliance
Most industries have a layer of stringent regulatory and legal compliance requirements that organizations must adhere to. Because it does not directly add to operational productivity, it is sometimes difficult to recognize compliance as a cost that could weigh on any organization. In industries like healthcare, banking and financial services, and legal, compliance is an existential burden on the organization.
Document indexing facilitates document archiving and retrieval processes. Combined with a modern document management system, the metadata-powered index is invaluable in establishing reliable audit trails. Document indexing is therefore necessary to facilitate compliance processes.
Finding actionable insights
Imagine the amount of unstructured information generated across an enterprise. The value of data is not only in the data itself, but also in the relationships between data sets. Functionally, a document indexing system organizes and makes sense of unstructured information spread across various file types and formats. However, an intelligent document indexing system also forces the relationships between disparate data sets to become apparent. And therein lies a goldmine of analytical insights that could reveal actionable, transformative insights.
Methods of indexing documents
Accuracy of document indexing is a determining factor in searchability and retrieval. Accuracy here refers to the accuracy of the indexing parameters entered as well as the consistency of the indexing parameters in the information system.
In simpler terms:Are the most relevant indexing parameters captured?Is indexing information captured correctly?The goal is to minimize exceptions. Based on these factors, document indexing methods can be classified into three broad categories.Indexing by double key.Double-key indexing is when two data entry operators, i.e. machines or humans who enter the data, independently enter the index fields. The two fields are then matched. If there is a discrepancy, the indexing parameter is compared to the source document to find the exact value.
Sometimes discrepancies are resolved by a third operator called an arbitrator. This method can also be applied with optical character recognition and a single input operator that checks if the captured index is correct.
Full-text indexing
Full-text indexing indexes every word and group of words or phrases in every document into a master word list with pointers to every instance of the word appearing in the documents or pages. The information can then be retrieved by carrying out a simple search by character string in the documents.
Although this seems like a holistic approach to indexing, the search user may find it more cumbersome to locate the exact relevance information due to an abundance issue. Also, because this approach creates a much larger index database, it is limited by system memory.
Indexing by variable search
Variable lookup indexing uses multiple existing indexing databases to intelligently populate index fields. This not only speeds up the indexing process, but also minimizes exceptions to a large extent by combining multiple levels of automated database searches and manual review.
Six things to consider for a good document indexing strategy
Indexing system design includes file naming, folder structure, markup, database relationships, indexing fields, and indexing settings. Often the design needs to be modular across departments. The indexing requirements of the human resources department will be different from those of the accounting department. This is why you need to make sure you have a system that can support multiple databases.The fruits of indexing documents lie in the ease of searching. However, searchability is a broader term than it first appears.”How quickly and how easily can the user find or obtain the most relevant information he is looking for?” – This is the question to keep in mind when developing an indexing strategy.