In the Future, What Will You Do with Your Content? Everything.

I've been fascinated by the fact that when I’m online, I can pretty much discover and learn about anything. Get details about what my friends are up to? Check. Browse an extensive encyclopedia with information about everything that’s ever happened? Check.

Why then, is the enterprise lagging behind? In many ways, the last bastion of information silos remains in the business world. But what if this weren't the case? What if you could find information from your company or organization as easily as you could find a recipe or movie review?

Assuming for a moment that this magical world existed and every document, report, social activity, customer action and meeting note were available at your fingertips, what would you do with it?

Here’s an idea of what I think people will be able to do in the future:

Deliver mind-blowing customer service. Before you answer a support phone call, your CRM will automatically pull up the customer’s profile and support history based on the caller ID and login information. Your support department can operate with the golden rule – and treat customers exactly the way they want to be treated.

Solve problems more efficiently. Think about how many times organizations reinvent the wheel, as every division or department wrestles with similar problems. In a world with endless connected content, sharing information about best practices will be a snap.

Work from wherever. The idea of commuting to an office will seem a little old-fashioned in the future. As mobile content creation catches up to content consumption, having the option to work remotely will be the norm, not the exception. Why waste hours commuting when you can be more productive on the couch?

Waste less time in meetings and on email. Full disclosure, I loathe email. As the same social tools we use at home make it to the enterprise, email will become a notification tool, not a record for communication. Thankfully, real work will take place on social networks and collaboration tools.

How do you think connected content will change the world?

Content without search is like a day without sunshine

As consumers, we have totally mastered search. You Google “Where should I eat in Los Altos” and you are directed to a results page that lists the top spots based on community reviews from Yelp and Urban Spoon. Likewise, you can get similar results on Wikipedia, digging into every topic imaginable.

Let’s compare that to a legacy ECM system or SharePoint.

Full text search is the key to find ability because it works the way users expect. As consumer I want to type in what I am looking for like “places to eat”, or what we remember “when was Elvis born?” and find the proper results. This process is called semantic search, and works by creating relevance based on ranking queries based on contextual meaning.

If you query SharePoint in a similar fashion, the results don’t match expectations. When you execute a similar search in Office 365 for “how were sales last month?” no data can be found.

The key to creating better find ability of content is not only having a relevant search index and engine, but also having the proper information to feed into enterprise search. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by indexing the full text of electronic documents ad extracting information from scanned paper to create more accurate results.

When you have full text search, you can search within content and documents to find the right information. In the query below, I searched for “company train schedule”, and was directed based on relevance and full-text to the folders and files that I was looking for.

As systems grow and storage expands, search will replace traditional navigation as the method for finding and discovering content. As you consider how you will find content and collaborate, make sure that search is a core part of your content strategy.