From Leisure to Learning – Finding Findability

Today was another one of those days where the events of the day converged and there is a personal awakening.  (See earlier post on Content Security and Corporate DNA).  What happened today involved my colleague Dan Keldsen yet again.  He came in this morning frustrated – apparently he spent last night looking for a new stove.  Characteristically, Dan used the internet to hone in on "the perfect product" and a local supplier, only it didn't work (thus the frustration).  Apparently he spent hours fumbling through clumsy websites that would not allow him to pinpoint stoves based on a variety of features/criteria he was interested in.  Some imposed their taxonomy on Dan, others only allowed simple search - offered no taxonomy, some did not permit multiple iterative searches based on tags and query.  He gave up.  When he shared his experiences with me this morning we both moaned how all too often technology is just so poorly exploited in even the commercial (i.e. you can drive revenue with this) sector of the market. 

Well, as fate would have it, today I paid a visit on Endeca.  They gave me a demo of a new product they are developing.  The serendipity of the day came from the fact that much of the functionality they  demonstrated directly addressed Dan's frustration – I had to share Dan's story with the folks at Endeca at this point.  This prompted them to bring up the Home Depot site, their customer.  Well sure enough, much of what Dan was looking for was there. (When I asked him later, Dan shared he never went to Home Dept's site last night, his loss I guess).   

Anyway, the lesson learned or awakening was realizing that the level of education needed regarding enterprise search and navigation ("findability') is greater than I ever imagined.  Technology from vendors such as Endeca, Recommind, Vivisimo, FAST and Autonomy – to name a few, is in all too many cases, being underutilized/ignored by a market ripe with possibility (both on the external commercial side, and the internal KM side).  This gave me a "warm and fuzzy" about our plans to offer an AIIM Design Workshop on Findability later this year and a Market IQ on Search.  Stay tuned.