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The Findability Factor

Findability. For our purposes, it describes how easy it is for your user community to find the content and resources they need to do their jobs. And if yours is like 49% of enterprises in a recent survey, your findability stinks.

So says a new survey and report from AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management. AIIM surveyed over 500 businesses in May 2008, posing questions designed to determine how easy it was to find information on their internal sites. The responses were surprising.

Findability is clearly a huge problem for many enterprises. When asked if "finding the information I need to do my job is difficult and time-consuming," 12% of respondents say they "Strongly Agree" and 37% say they "Agree" with the statement. Just 4% of respondents answered that they "Strongly Disagreed."

These are pretty damning statistics for anyone that's involved in their organization's enterprise search and content creation. Technology can only shoulder some of the blame for the challenges in finding what users need, however.

When asked what percentage of their organization's information was searchable online, 66% of the survey respondents said it was less than half. The leaves a lot of information in dusty old file cabinets away from the prying eyes of even the best search engines.

While getting paper documents digitized and posted to searchable internal sites is critical for improving findability, the survey also found that few enterprises have any clear plan in place for accomplishing this. We'll look a bit more at these challenges and some potential solutions in future posts.

For additional information on the study and its findings, AIIM is hosting a free webinar on Thursday, June 26 at 2:00 PM EDT. The webinar should be well worth checking out, and AIIM will also be publishing the full report titled "AIIM Market IQ on Findability" in July 2008.

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