Search Done Right

I finished up my spring tradeshow season at Enterprise 2.0 this week in Boston. The event is unlike many others I attended this year because much of the technology being discussed is still in its infancy. Instead of listening to debates on best practices for portal or document management rollouts, I was hearing about the latest features around communities, micro-blogs and avatars. The exhibit hall floor was an interesting hybrid of traditional software vendors (Microsoft, IBM, EMC, etc.) with new and emerging organizations (Telligent, Altassian, Jive, etc.) 

Not to be outdone by the emerging exhibitors, many of the traditional vendors made highly anticipated announcements about their growth in the enterprise 2.0 world. IBM introduced a new 3D meeting service through Lotus Sametime  while Microsoft continued to push SharePoint as the collaboration suite of the future. 

Not only were the vendors a broad mix, but so were the attendees. Many were return visitors to the conference sharing success stories around building global communities, forums and knowledge-sharing applications within their organizations. Others were first-time visitors struggling to find the real ROI behind collaboration software and Twitter-like applications.

With such a heterogeneous group of vendors and attendees, it is hard to identify a dominant theme of the conference. One trend I did notice is that within large organizations it is becoming increasingly easier to create content. With this growing trend, I couldn’t help but wonder how users would start to solve their findability challenges in using these applications. Using communities, wikis, micro-blogs and other emerging tools is a great way to capture and share knowledge. However, there are a lot of hidden challenges.

How do organizations prevent duplication? How can they identify when a forum or community is no longer of value? How will they show which is the “right” piece of knowledge when contradictory ideas are published over time? 

There is a lot of new technology out on the market, but some of the same challenges around information management have not gone away. I will be interested to see how organizations overcome these challenges. I still view many of these challenges as search problems – but then again my brain has been trained to think in search terms.

My recommendation to organizations implementing and evaluating new enterprise 2.0 capabilities is to think about how these new tools fit in your overall information management strategy. Today the core problem is an explosive amount of content being created. With these emerging tools, those challenges are only going to increase. This means you have to plan for how these tools will be used, who will be using these tools, what goal are they achieving and finally how will users access and find the knowledge being generated. Only by answering those questions can you assure your organizations success in implementing and integrating these emerging enterprise 2.0 solutions.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 10:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.