This over-used phrase was coined by Bill Gates in 1996 (for those of you that are too young to remember). The phrase was used in an essay he wrote regarding the future of the Internet – an interesting read to see how far we have come. (The essay in its entirety, kindly provided by Craig Bailey can be accessed here.) The phrase became adopted by every vendor on the planet when marketing document management and ECM solutions. However, I digress. Fast forward 17 years.
Content is no longer king. It now resides in the king’s kitchen with servants who don’t know how to cook serving up an alphabet soup that no one finds particularly useful. It is the overabundance of content and the inability to manage and find the ‘kings jewels’ that has now become the challenge. Over the past few years we have seen a renewed focus on enterprise search in that many organizations are realizing that swapping out the search engine doesn’t really buy them anything. It may deliver different bells and whistles, visualization, and other handy (if not useful) features. The shift is organizations are now looking at search as a key component in the enterprise infrastructure. To achieve this objective organizations are understanding the correlation between search and taxonomies as part of the search solution. Along with that are metadata generation and auto-classification technologies.
It is no longer content that is king but context. Although Bill Gates was a visionary in the projected use of the Internet I wonder now if he thinks ‘Content is King’ was maybe the wrong phrase to use. Content we have but do we have content that can be distilled from a variety of sources to deliver not only the relevant information, based on the end user needs and in the right context. Any thoughts or comments about your search solution?
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