Woops - sorry - I mean Managers Say the Majority of Information Obtained for Their Work Is Useless, Accenture Survey Finds

Jack Vinson picks up on this survey that rang many bells for me and brought back my brief period in charge of the intranet at the BBC. I can so well remember the frustration when managers would say “I can never find anything on the intranet” as if it was my fault. On my grumpier days I would respond with “Have you ever tried sharing anything on it yourself” but mostly I bored them into submission with explanations about why intranet search couldn’t work like Google as this was basically what they thought they wanted.

With all due deference to the sponsors of this blog - remember this was around five years ago and be sure to read the interview with John Markus Lervik below for more context - I came to the conclusion that corporate intranet search was pretty much pointless. Not enough people created linky content so Google was out. Most stuff was static documents stored in “knowledge coffins” (hat tip to PWC for the terminology) that relied too heavily on structure, determined by someone else and without the benefit of context and lastly, with a few rare exceptions, once you found the document it was likely to be badly written, barely relevant and out of date!

Like Jack I came to believe that what people really wanted was to find someone who knew what they were talking about. Even if that “knew what they were talking about” meant knowing which document to read, why and where it was to be found. So what we did was start building online social spaces like forums, blogs and wikis in which highly contextual, subjective, complex patterns and information could start to surface about anything and everything in the business that was interesting and worth writing about.

The result was that when someone said on our forums “I need to find the official documentation on x because I am about to do y” they were usually rewarded, and very quickly, with multiple answers along the lines of “Well I found this document answered my questions because ….. ” pointing them at the documentation. Indeed increasingly the source they were directed to was a blog or a wiki containing up to date, contextualized information.

Having context in the question, context in the answer and the collective memory of your corporate meatspace, empowered by the mighty hyper-link, in between is hard to beat. Add to this the trust of your sources built up over a period of online socializing and you might have less managers whining that they can never find anything!