Findability Report from AIIM

"Why is that I can search the billions of pages of the World Wide Web in seconds, but I can't find the agreement I drafted last week in our own internal systems?"

The web has changed our views on how we should be able to find and interact with our information and knowledge.  Dan Keldsen and Carl Frappaolo of AIIM surveyed over 500 individuals on findability. They looked at how people search, navigate, discover and retrieve content.

Dan and Carls's AIIM Market IQ on Findability is now freely available for download. It has over 65 pages and 70 charts/figures. A majority believe that Findability in their organization is "Worse" to "Much Worse" than their own organization's consumer-facing web sites and 49% of respondents have "No Formal Goal" for Enterprise Findability within their organizations.

Key Findings:

• 49% of respondents Agreed or Strongly Agreed that Finding the Information I Need to Do My Job is Difficult and Time Consuming
  
• 69% of respondents believe that 50% of their organization's information is searchable online
  
• 49% of respondents have No Formal Goal for Enterprise Findability within their organizations
  
• 50% of respondents believe that Findability in their organization is Worse to Much Worse than their own organization's consumer-facing web sites

In my view, one of the goals of knowledge management is to make information findable. One of the issues with early knowledge management systems is that they merely created yet another separate place to try to find content using a unique search methodology.  One of the goals of knowledge management 2.0 is to capture that content as part of the workflow, in systems with integrated search and search methodology.

I am still reading through the report and hope to write more about it later this week.