At the end of last quarter we surveyed our clients and the general marketplace and asked them their priorities for 2013 as it applies to unstructured content. The results indicated search, migration, and data privacy protection were the applications selected as the highest priorities.

However, there were three additional options included in the survey. These were metadata generation, auto-classification, and taxonomy. In both groups, each of these options was rated at approximately 98% as a 2013 priority. These were not included in the survey results as Concept Searching felt they were infrastructure components optionally available to deploy any of the applications not the end in itself. In addition, we felt our clients skewed the results as they have all recognized the need and have already implemented the products.

Removing our clients from the survey, what was very interesting, based on historical data and our experience, this does represent a change in the marketplace, and the growing awareness of more organizations to take a holistic approach to managing unstructured content, placing a much higher priority on these three technologies as a business enabler.

Obviously for years and years organizations have implemented taxonomies either at a very basic level or from a very sophisticated level. So taxonomies are no surprise nor are they a ‘new’ novel idea. Pulling in metadata generation and auto-classification provides the twist as all three were rated at almost 100%. I remember 13 years ago visiting an extremely large company who specialized in consulting and business oriented talent management, a company whose livelihood focused primarily on the use of unstructured content. I remember they were pretty much clueless about these technologies. Surprising? Maybe not considering the time lag.

Although participants in this group are not the norm, I am curious either from an organizational perspective or from a vendor perspective if the importance and understanding of metadata, classification, and taxonomies are recognized infrastructure business enablers? And are they considered a priority in the organization?