1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to enterprise system management, and more particularly to systems and methods for providing a map of an enterprise system.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, information retrieval is accomplished by keyword searches, author searches, date searches, and so forth. If a specific document is sought, very specific parameters may be input into a system that maintains documents in order to locate the specific document sought. In an enterprise system, the abundant number of documents and document storage locations can make document searching and retrieval particularly challenging.
Disadvantageously, a user searching for the specific document in an enterprise system does not have knowledge of some or all of these specific parameters. For example, if a user wants to locate documents associated with a particular tax audit, various authors, dates, keywords, and so forth may be associated with a set of documents that satisfy the particular documents sought. Accordingly, the user may enter search parameters that will most likely return a set of documents the user may sift through in order to manually locate the specific documents that will satisfy the documents associated with the particular tax audit, for instance. Searching through all the documents or a large sub-set of documents in the enterprise system is often time consuming and inefficient.
Traditional records management systems allow a record administrator to select a class or classes of records and a date range solely for identifying data stored within the particular records management system. Disadvantageously, these records management systems do not allow identification of employees, organizations, other repositories, or systems because there is no known relationship between them. The identification of a class or classes of records captures data and evidence for the identified classes of records, and may not take into consideration the people associated with the records.
Conventionally, individuals manually determine the affected and involved people in a matter. There is typically no purpose-built application to perform this determination. Instead, the determination is usually a manual process using interviews, research through employee directories and organizational charts, and so forth.
Further, various systems may delete the documents over time. Thus, a user may not be able to locate the documents pertinent to a search request if some or all of the documents have been deleted.