aiim findability survey

Following on from their Enterprise 2.0 Survey, Dan & Carl AIIM are doing something similar for Findability. Dan has provided an overview on their approach & requested feedback and also offered an initial list of technology solutions. I like their open approach to both constructing the survey & making the final report available for free (and altho Carl is probably right that the final result shouldn't be a wiki, it should be something more digestible than a single PDF).


One observation I would make about findability tech is that you basically have 3 groups:

• Content creators / providers
  
• Content users
  
• Content managers (from both an IT & editorial perspective)

And these 3 groups can have 3 relationships to the tech:

• Don't use
  
• Consume but don't own / control
  
• Own / control

Trad search is owned by content managers & consumed by content users. Trad taxonomies tend be owned by content managers (hopefully with some input from the business) & consumed by both content providers & users. Findability tools - esp. social software - tend to have broader spans of ownership/control which makes them simultaneously more power AND harder to manage.