BizTechTalk

Findability Survey is Now Live - Weigh In!

Our Q2 2008 research project is the Market IQ on Findability - and the survey to feed our data-driven approach to the quarterly research is now live. Do you have search in your enterprise? At all? Good search? Horrible? User-created tagging? Armies of Taxonomists? An ability to look across applications, repositories, sites in your quest for content, information, or knowledge?

Regardless of the state of organization's Findability Status - your input is extremely important to us. Please, weigh on in, and join the 100 or so people that have already completed the survey in the few hours we've had this open.

The more data the better, and this time around, we are looking not just for business drivers, functionality needed/wanted/hated, but also looking at satisfaction and implementation feedback on the list of companies/solutions provided in a previous post (vote in the survey, not in the blog entry).

Findability and all that it entails, search, taxonomy, user interfaces, information architecture and much, much more, is something that I've been very deeply involved in for the last 8 years, as an instructor, consultant, and implementer, as well as a researcher.

Search isn't solved just yet folks - but there has been quite a revolution in the world of Findability in the last 5 years, and my sense is that adoption at both the trailing and leading edges are still nowhere near where they could be. Would love to be proven wrong, or validated.

For any of the people who had taken our public or private versions of the Proving Ground on Information Architecture and Taxonomy (while I was at Delphi Group), feel free to join in the survey experience. For that matter, would love to hear how your projects have progressed, so feel free to connect with me in the nearly year old role within Market Intelligence at AIIM.org.

The resulting research will be freely available, due in late June, and will have an associated free public webinar as well.

In the short-term, you also have a chance to win 1 of 25 gift certificates for Amazon.com if you provide your e-mail address (so we can contact you if you win), and complete the survey in it's entirety.

I'm monitoring the survey via built-in chat in the footer of each survey page, as well as via Twitter. Any issues, please let me know.

Final List of Findability-related Solutions/Providers

Our Market IQ on Findability survey will be available shortly (feel free to sign up in advance for the webinar in June that will discuss the findings), in the meantime, anyone currently using any of the following solutions, you may want to keep an eye out for the survey launch, and and give us your opinions around Findability.

Not just on the effectiveness of the solution, but on your experiences and concerns with Findability (Search, Taxonomy, Interfaces, Visualization, etc.), to help us uncover the current state of the market, where problems still exist, what benefits you've seen, and so on.

Stay tuned... in the meantime, the list:
alias i (LingPipe)
Ankiro
Antidot
Attivio
Autonomy
Baynote
Bitext
Brainware
Clarabridge
Cogenz
Connectbeam
Connotate Technologies
Consona (KNOVA)
Convera Retrievalware
Conversive
CopperEye
Coveo
Dieselpoint
Dow Jones (Factiva)
Dow Jones (Synaptica)
dtSearch
EMC (askOnce)
Endeca
Exalead
Expert System
FAST
FirstRain
FunnelBack
Google Search Applliance
IBM (Dogear)
IBM (OmniFind)
Infospace
Infovell
Inmagic
InQuira
IntelliSearch
Inxight (Business Objects)
ISYS
Kaidara
Kazeon
Leximancer
Megaputer
Mercado
Microsoft
NextIT
Omniture (Visual Sciences)
OnTopia
Open Text
Oracle (Secure Enterprise Search)
PolySpot
Progress Software (EasyAsk)
Radian6
Raritan Technologies
Recommind
Reuters (Calais)
SAP (NetWeaver Enterprise Search)
SAS (Enterprise Miner)
SchemaLogic
Scuttle
Siderean
SignaText
Sinequa
SLI Systems
SPSS (Clementine)
SPSS (Lexiquest)
StoredIQ
Stratify (Iron Mountain)
Synomia
Temis
Teragram (SAS)
Thunderstone
Verity K2 (Autonomy)
Vivisimo
WCC
Wordmap
X1
Xerox
ZyLAB
Open Source: Lucene
Open Source: Lucene + Solr
Other (please specify)

The Business of Web 2.0: Getting a Return on Technology

  The Business of Web 2.0: Getting a Return on Technology, from SAS Institute - White Papers, Webcasts and Case Studies - ZDNet 
  Originally uploaded by dankeldsen

I'm confused, is this a whitepaper or a webcast? And if it's a webcast, why does it require a plugin on a Mac, when Flash-based video runs rampant on ZDNet? Ah, taxonomy and usability, my old friends... run amok!

Maps, Concepts, Process - Tools for Innovation

I was recently invited to present at the monthly Thursday afternoon meeting of the KM Forum, on topics relating to Mindmapping, and with a specific twist towards Knowledge Management and Innovation Management.

If you are in the Boston area, I would recommend sitting in on these sessions - the KM Forum is an organization of practitioners and thought-leaders in Knowledge Management that has been operating in the Boston area for some time now. Great people (saw some old friends), and really interesting discussions come about.

I decided to take my "hyper keynote" style a step further, and created a 130 slide deck, which ended up at about a 45 minute presentation. I've posted it via slideshare.net, and embedded it below. It holds together fairly well without voiceover, but I'll be working on an alternative version to set some more of the context.

The purpose overall of the presentation was to provide a wide view of the types of tools and methodologies that an individual could use, that teams could use, and that organizations as a whole could use. Borrowed from my background in semantic/conceptual search and auto-classification, business process analysis, mindmapping, brainstorming and winnowing techniques, visualization techniques, and innovation from a number of angles. It was a blast for me - and we had some nice discussion afterwards.

Would love any feedback based on the slide deck as it stands, and the experiences of people using any of these tools and techniques. This is an ongoing area of interest for me, and am always looking for deeper, richer information on what others are doing. Luckily, in the 40+ podcasts I've done over the last year, and my experiences of the last 13 years or so, I had quite a fountain of knowledge to pull from, which made the presentation actually quite easy to pull together.

Let's discuss - and share how you're solving problems, and creating new products/services/opportunities within your organization.

Link to presentation "Knowledge = Innovation" on slideshare.net.

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