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.

ready, fire, aiim - enterprise 2.0 report

A detailed discussion by James Dellow on the Enterprise 2.0 report from AIIM. As James notes, there are lots of graphs. The data comes from 441 responses to a web-based survey instrument and about a third of respondents were IT personnel - so at best we have indication of trends rather than anything too reliable. However given the paucity of data available - we have some material from Forrester (most of it not in the public domain) and Melcrum's report on social media & employee engagement.

So let's have a quick canter through:

• Like James, I like the vaguely collaborative nature of Section 1: Defining Enterprise 2.0. We get Andrew McAfee, Dave Weinberger, Patti Anklam & others shooting the sugar about what E2.0 means, maaaan. The debates about the definition are more interesting than the definition itself. And I like how they have pretty much reprinted the emails.
• Section 2 on Tech is a bit blahblahblah - nothing we haven't heard before - and I'm with James in being unconvinced by the 1.0, 1.5, 2.0 split. Figure 2 is pretty much what you'd expect with wikis at the top of the pops (2 years ago blogs would have been at number 2 instead of SNS). Figure 3 is also what you'd expect - the most E2.0 tools are generally the ones with least awareness - blogs being the honourable exception probably due to the hoohah about them since 2004. "Search" scores heavily as a E2.0 tool - but I take that to be i. an example of Google's marketing prowess & ii. a damning indictment of the last decade of attempts at enterprise search solutions. Is search E2.0? I guess it depends how it's done, baby...
• Section 3 looks at the primary business drivers (oo-er). The message here is that E2.0 is primarily about collaboration. Which I don't have a problem with. The IT-centric nature of the survey sample can be seen in Figure 10 - "yes we all know what open source is". Based on a decade of experience, I would disagree that 53% of the respondents fully understand the term "Knowledge Management" but lets not teleport into that world of pain. Figure 12 is interesting in that E2.0 is not seen as well suited to individuals. This is probably because we think of E2.0 as "social" or "collaborative" and completely opposed to individualistic applications. But in fact, E2.0 stuff offers individuals a powerful set of tools for Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). And if they are to succeed, they have to appeal to individuals first AND THEN groups. Work is done by individuals within groups NOT by groups themselves.
• Figure 22 in Section 4 makes a nice complement to Figures 2 & 3. I am intrigued that mashups rank so highly - again this may be due to the IT-centric survey sample. It's like to see those figures split out by the role demographic of respondents (IT vs. everyone else). Figure 28 says that USERS are driving all this. Figure 30 indicates that most uses of E2.0 tools are tactical and Figure 34 will get consultants rubbing their hands in glee while Figure 36 will get them quiet again.
• Section 5 on generational & cultural attitudes is way too prominent but might allow a more nuanced discussion of the "Gen Y love it / Boomers hate it" non-debate. We don't know much about the KM-inclined group except that they are, well, "KM-inclined". Which makes them love E2.0 more.
• Section 6 should be the important one. It's the one with the conclusions. It says a lot of very sensible things about culture and continuums of engagement/collaboration vs. protectionism/control. But it could say a whole lot more. Let's hope that over the coming weeks, both authors will.

And finally, why is this report only available as a single, clunky, dowdy PDF? How Enterprise 2.0 is that?