One thing you'd expect to fall out of this is greater interest in federated search, i.e. having one search box that reaches out to the silos and aggregates the responses. And indeed, 60% of member and 30% of non-member respondents rated this capability "imperative" and/or "significant". (Members have supposedly "exhibited greater levels of familiarity with many technologies".) Interestingly, googling federated search turns up not one paid listing by a legacy enterprise search company! Could it be these companies aren't interested in being part of a cross-silo solution?

Another answer is that federated search has simply never delivered on it's promise; it's quick and easy but doesn't satisfy - mostly, in my view, because it is hard enough to deal with the real differences in silos of content within a single software architecture, let alone across multiple search architectures.

Both members and non-members of the AIIM Association seem to agree on certain things. (If you are following along at home, look at the charts on pages 17 and 18). For example:

• Social network features like voting and bookmarking draw poor importance ratings. This seems likely tied to the overall poor ratings for findability, i.e. what's the point of voting on poor results in a multi-silo environment?

• Behavioral search is similarly given poor interest ratings, likely for the same reasons.

• Commonly available features like concept search, text analytics, entity extraction, clustering, etc, get middle of the pack importance ratings. (Non-members are even a little tougher on some of these.) I believe this is because these features are either over-emphasized (as the "answer") or simply don't work in a customer's environment. Many of these features are built on very specific sets of data like web pages or news and may require significant tuning and/or integration in the enterprise.

One big disagreement is around the value of metadata. Members rate it very highly - ~75% call it "imperative" or "significant", but only ~37% of non-members agree. My guess here is that members work at companies that have greater investments in information access, and as a result have access to more and better metadata. This is a clear call to action for legacy enterprise players: helping to find, field and use metadata is still an important task for relatively new users.

I'll have a final word on the findability study in my next post... This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it if you have any questions or comments in the meantime.