One of the things that I find most frustrating about our industry is our tendency to speak in terms that only we understand.
I found the latest example in our new Findability Market IQ (http://www.aiim.org/findability). We asked two sets of end users -- and "aiim" set and a general business set -- for their degree of understanding of 28 terms associated with findability, search, and IOA (information organization and access).
On the AIIM side, these 11 terms (out of 28) were understood by 50% or more of those surveyed.
- Favorites
- Thesaurus
- Meta-based Search
- Free-text Search
- Taxonomies
- Security
- Relevancy ranking
- Tagging
- Tag-based search
- Data Dictionaries
- Information Architecture
Go to a general business sample, though, and not a single term was understood by at least 50% of the sample. Not one of the 28 we gave them. The lesson -- just because YOU (ECM vendors, search vendors, hard core IT types) understand a term doesn't mean that it is useful in a sales context.
And don't forget that we provide a comprehensive training program in IOA/search (http://www.aiim.org/training).
