Catalysts Limited

Compliance regulations now affect every organisation large and small in both the public, private and professional sectors. Large organisations have been busy for some time implementing large scale compliance and integrated search solutions to enable them to cope effectively. Their smaller brethren cannot on the whole afford a similar initial investment, which can run to hundreds of thousands of pounds, nor the time, which can be many months, that is needed for such solutions. Consequently many have struggled on as best they can relying on staff and existing systems. Their efficiency and cost effectiveness have therefore suffered disproportionately.

However there is a solution and Catalysts is assembling it right now. There are four components to it as we see it and they are as follows:

• A document management system if one does not yet exist. Into this can go all the regulated documents that otherwise would exist only on network drives, workstation and laptop hard drives where they are uncontrolled, unindexed and possibly prone to loss and duplication and where there is little or no version control. A DMS plus associated indexing and search can be expensive but does not need to be - there are open source vendors with excellent products and even their professional versions with support contracts can be very affordable. Catalysts plans to offer one such product from our partner KnowledgeTree.
• A document digitisation application to capture, digitise and store in the DMS all incoming hard copy documents covered by regulations. The process would also benefit from additional features such as metadata capture to enhance subsequent search and access. Indeed a good application can also be used to treat and store existing digital documents into the DMS. Catalysts plans to offer a solution from a new partner Capsys who have recently integrated their solution with the KnowledgeTree DMS.
• A federated search engine that does not itself index all the repositories that the organisation already has in-house nor those on which it relies externally but can search all their indices and assemble the results in a manner suitable to the various user groups in the organisation. This it does by way of connectors that interpret the users' search and apply it in terms that the various indices can accept. It then collates the results given back to it and presents them in whatever manner has been selected. This is a very cost effective way for documents to be found and avoids the necessity of re-indexing all the existing data. Indexing of external sources may, of course, not even be allowed by the publisher concerned. Catalysts plans to offer a solution from its partner Solcara that is already in widespread use in the UK legal and public sectors and for which many connectors have been developed.
• An implementation resource to bring the previous three components together and configure them to meet each client's particular needs. This is Catalysts' own technical team.