It is, of course, not enough to simply build an enterprise search platform. Sure, you can do what we did on day one, when our Google Search Appliance (GSA) arrived and we gleefully hooked it up to our local Sacramento Office network and did a global target of everything. You know, just to see if our GSA worked. It did. And in short order, as we blew out its one-million file crawl limit, we discovered the obvious: LSNC has a whole lot of documents and other files strewn about on various file servers and desktops, like so much digital flotsam. Needless to say, we did not need a TIG-funded GSA to reveal that fact. To know that, all one has to do is invoke Windows Explorer and peruse one’s local office file server. Enough said.

From the perspective of our enterprise search goals, most of these files do not contain content that has what we refer to as “shared value.” Namely, advocacy or other work-related content or information that LSNC staff would want to search for because they want it or need it to get the job done.

This observation does not suggest that all the other individual documents or files have no worth. They do, but to other purpose. For example, on a practical level, an advocate may have any number of drafts or versions of a document or file, but what the organizations will want to target and what users will want to get their hands on is the final or more polished version of that content. And that is likely what the original author will intend to share.

But if the organization targets everything, well, in the broadest sense what those who search will get is a lot of extraneous or incorrect or incomplete content. And a less serious but real-world challenge is the organization’s need to separate the true wheat (even if marginal) from the inevitable digital chaff on local office file servers and desktops. (Oh, come on — you know what we’re talking about here! All those personal photos, MP3s, YouTube videos, recipes from the Food Network, National Geographic wallpapers, long forgotten software downloads, … need I go on?)

There is a separate set of challenges to initially identify existing content that one would want to target with a GSA that has, after all, a set file limit. And then one has to work out practical policies and protocols for how to handle new content to be added to those targets. In upcoming posts, we will document how LSNC has approached both of these challenges.

But for now, here is a macro breakdown of what content we value and are initially targeting with the GSA. It is actually more simple to do than we initially thought it would be:

• Designated document repository master directory structures – that’s a mouthful, but it turns out that’s how we refer to it. We have worked out what we consider to be a basic, workable “taxonomy” for organizing files, to be detailed in an upcoming post. The short version is that both existing and new content that has been identified as valued will reside on project-specific files servers that have purposefully organized directory structures. This will make more sense once we explain (fairly soon) why we are adopting the structures or organizations we have worked out, and why, and how they will serve the overarching goal of “findability.” Stay tuned.
• Shared intranet content – within LSNC, we refer to our intranet as the “secured network,” the lingua franca here for what other organizations refer to as their intranet. At this juncture, most legal services programs have some sort of intranet structure already in place, with varied user-side implementations to give staff access to its content. (Currently, ours is built out with MediaWiki as the principal content management tool, but soon to be supplanted with either WordPress and/or Google Sites. (I have posted details on that side story at LSNC’s tech blog, Webdogs 2.0.) By historical definition, everything on our existing intranet is valued. It’s fairly lean, mean, to the point, well organized and includes among other things, in no particular order:
  • Administrative manual
  • Case management manual
  • Development and funding-raising resources
  • LSC policy archive
  • LSNC forms (administrative and case-related)
  • LSNC policy archive
  • MCLE – Training resources and forms
  • Personnel and other shared human resource information
  • Specialized Regional Counsel content (content subject to gatekeeper function)
  • Specialized client content (content targeted for LawHelp access)
• Select LSNC public web content – LSNC is now reaping dramatic benefits from its decade-long focus on using its public web presence to create and share usable content for advocates. We are still in the process of parsing out those portions of the LSNC public content we want to target with the GSA, but these include our rich reservoir of advocate content on CalWorks (the name of California’s TANF program) and Food Stamps, and special project-specific content that derives from our Race Equity Project and housing and economic development work. The point here is that our enterprise search model will include not just valued content behind our firewall but also select public content that is every bit as valuable to our staff in getting the job done.
• Pika Case Management System – this will likely be the last piece of the enterprise search puzzle for us, but a major chunk of our GSA file limit will be devoted to exploiting the GSA to alter dramatically how LSNC staff search and locate data within Pika. We have already run some initial targeting tests on Pika and we really, really liked what the search results looked like. It is not a technical challenge to target Pika with a GSA, not at all, but there are some significant challenges in sorting out how best to limit the GSA crawl to target precisely what we really want to make searchable, without blowing out our GSA file limit. Once we work out those kinks, we will likely replace the native Pika search functions (which is little more than a raw SQL search function) with a customized subset of GSA functions.

In the scheme of this project, content is king, knowledge content rules, and the Google Search Appliance is Gandalf, the wizard asking “What do you see? Can you see anything?” Indeed.

Whatever you do, please don’t call it a “brief bank.”

Language choices have powerful effects, so it does matter what one calls things, to good or ill effect. And for some 40 years legal services field programs have sought the holy grail of a “brief bank.” Having worked in five different field programs and two support centers in five states over 35+ years, I can personally attest that every one of those organizations thought they had or wanted or envisioned or aspired in some way to a “brief bank.” As if.

There are legions of reasons why, in practice, the brief-bank model never really works for most field programs. Among those are program management and resource priorities that obstruct it or at least don’t value it; lack of a commonly understood and shared purpose among its target users (you know, those pesky “employees”) why it matters to have such a model; and an impractical — or at least poorly designed — approach to creating and maintaining the model (you know, like, no one is really responsible to make it happen and/or actually find the time or resources to maintain the damn thing, whatever form it takes).

Within the legal services community, the notion of a “brief bank” long ago morphed into something akin to a vestigial organ: Not entirely useless or without function, but pretty much something no longer used as it once was. If ever it was. And even by its own self-referential term as a “bank,” one gets the message that this is a model for something that one does not actually use on a daily or regular basis. Rather, things of apparent value are placed there for storage, for safe-keeping, for later retrieval but for good reason not readily accessible because they must be secured. You can count on it being there. You can bank on it.

Actually, you cannot. Because the real purpose for which it exists, more often than not, is typically useless. The old-school model “brief bank” was a collection of hard-copy documents stored in your individual office file cabinet (or that pile of folders over there, in the corner of your office); or down the hall somewhere in a different cabinet maybe maintained by someone else (or in a pile of folders that the “someone” would label and organize “by the end of the week”). On a good day (OK, on a really good day), you or someone else could remember which document was about what and where it was located. On most days, not so much. And with the emergence in the last 20 years of the digital-document work style to which we are now accustomed, the “brief bank” has become a case or project folder on your local or a shared network drive. You know, something like our Auburn Office shared directory, in all its indigenous glory:

Surely, this is an advocate’s digital paradise, right, all there but for the taking? … if you can remember what is there … where it is … and find it. (“Oh, what you’re looking for is in a different office? I’ll get back to you.”) And that’s one of our smaller offices. (However, you’ve got to love the use of caps here, sort of a poor person’s metadata model for attributing value to some files.) I thought to illustrate here the four times as large, charmingly nuanced (née dystopic) horizontal and vertical structure of our flagship Sacramento Office, but it was too vast in dimension to use as a visual example. But you get the point.

I must admit, I cringed a touch when reading the fifth “Purpose Served: Knowledge Management” element in LSC’s recent recommendations on baseline technologies for legal services field programs. Stating “what should be in place,” it invokes “pleading and brief banks” as its primary concrete paradigm. As I was saying, language is powerful and apparently the choice of this concrete terminology in the more abstract context of “knowledge management” has not changed. It should.

The concrete challenge for legal services program is not to create a “pleading and brief bank.” The challenge is to identify and organize and manage and make “findable” a wide range of documents and other files that have shared value within the organization. (“Sample pleadings and briefs” are only one piece of that paradigm.) Within that larger framework, the LSC baseline technology recommendation regarding the need for knowledge management is right on the money.

And Legal Services of Northern California (LSNC) is a typical example of this challenge within the post-merger world of legal services. The structural scale and geographic reach of and substantive range of advocacy by LSNC exacerbates a fundamental dilemma all modern legal services field programs suffer: How does one make it fast, easy and intuitive for program staff to find and access all the different types of “knowledge content” within the four walls of the organization?

Within LSNC’s organizational structure there is a wide range of substantive advocacy and administrative expertise, specialization and skill sets, all of which are sources for shared information and knowledge. By “information” I mean that the organization has a variety of documents and other digital data types — most commonly, these are word processing files, PDF documents, spreadsheets, presentation files, HTML pages and client databases — that have content the organization perceives as valued and useful. By “knowledge” I mean that the information exists in a context that offers understanding. A “usable” document offers the promise of shared knowledge because it brings understanding of the information it contains from one person to another.

But there’s the rub: What does a non-profit organization like LSNC do to bring to the surface the usable knowledge of all, i.e., all the specifically identified and valued, usable content wherever it exists within the limits of the organization that can and should be shared and available to other LSNC staff? That is the core question the Findability Project will attempt to answer in a practical way that works for a legal services field program.

The LSNC approach is to build a network infrastructure that supports enterprise search, premised on deployment of a Google Search Appliance. It is also premised on thrashing out practical ways to identify, organize and maintain the valued documents and other files that will be the target of enterprise search. It also premised, as importantly, on figuring out as “user friendly” a way as we can to ensure LSNC staff use the system, want to use the system, know why they would want to use the system … to find what they need.

Hence, the Findability Project.