Post by: Ronn Levine

While only 17% of companies are now using some form of visualization -Spotfire, MicroStrategy, Insight, for example- almost half of the respondents to a just-released SIIA Content Division survey said that they plan to implement visualization within the next 18 months. That ranks as the number one technology that companies are planning to implement. Next came Semantics at 31% and mobile publishing at 24%.

Interestingly, there are two technologies that are getting very little use now but are being almost unanimously researched. While just 8% of respondents use a mobile content manager program such as Atavist or Appcelerator, 92% are researching it. And the same goes for Crowdsourcing. Just 7% use it but 87% are researching it.

While 50% of the respondents are using data management technologies, only another 12% have it in the planning over the next 18 months. Social media remains an area where companies are just not sure how much time or resources to spend. Only 24% of the respondents are using a social media management platform such as Lithium or Radian 6 while just another 17% are planning to implement that in the next 18 months.

At DataContent 2012, Russell Perkins called Big Data a “capability, a means to an end…Big Data can make our offerings deeper and richer.” Thus it makes sense that 67% of the respondents would like to hear use cases about Big Data. That was the highest figure for that question. Next came Semantics at 62.5% and Visualization at 50%. No other topic drew over 33%.

In other questions, 66% of the respondents feel “somewhat confident” that they have the relevant information needed to make the right decision on whether to implement new technologies. Almost 14% are not confident, and no one is very confident. Only 41% of the respondents said they would be interested in attending a vendor showcase of short technology overviews; 24% said no and 34% said maybe, need more information. Almost 60% classified themselves as mainstream adopters when it comes to embracing new technology; 30% said they are late to the party and just 11% said they are early adopters. The respondents said that only 3% of their customers are early adopters.

The company sizes of the respondents varied from $250 million and over (22%) to under $10 million (33%). A majority of the respondents are at the CEO or division head level, and almost 50% represent B2B companies.

  Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline