Opinion - Blogosphere http://fromthehart.typepad.com/ - From the Hart. We feature a blog where debate and discussion has aroused interest. This month: Factiva CEO Clare Hart.

Main post - 5 January 2006

What do I see in 2006?

My predictions for enterprise information management in 2006 centre around:

1) Search. Everyone knows Google, Yahoo and MSN (or GYM as we affectionately call them), which have transformed our culture. But search as we know it has its limits. I see it changing in three distinct ways: visualisation (fewer lists of headlines with links to articles or web pages and more meaningful information presented visually, as Factiva is doing in Search 2.0); more emphasis on vertical search; and more emphasis on enterprise search.

2) Collaboration Tools. This is linked to enterprise search. Interest in collaboration tools will intensify as companies work to respond quickly to market opportunities and threats. They must tap into all of their intellectual and information assets. Driving this trend is the need for employees to find the information they need to do their jobs. Today, most do not find what they need.

3) Metadata. Taxonomy and ontology terms are becoming more common and broadly understood, thanks to del.icio.us and Flickr, but, as Forrester notes, it is early days. I believe that a more strategic approach to meta-tagging is required for the enterprise. Folksonomies are good, but relying on business people to tag articles on their own is risky - they are simply too busy to take the extra minute required to tag. A more powerful means of managing information requires a strategic view of how the organisation's information must be categorised and tools to automate the universal and consistent application of the tags must be implemented.

Comment - 9 January 2006