Here is a good brief article on the importance of search for effective knowledge management. James Robertson writes, Good search is knowledge management, as one of a series of reports he produces at Step Two designs, an Australian content management consultancy. In “Good search is knowledge management,” James also links to two earlier useful reports on the subject: Intranet search reports and Search engine 'best bets.'
He makes several good points. First he says that “search is often implemented as a 'second thought' within organizations. First the intranet or document management system is installed, and then search is added to help users 'find stuff' within the growing repository of information.”
I have seen this happen many times. I have also seen poor search capability listed as one of main reasons intranets and knowledge managements systems are not used. This even occurred for one major telecom where there was documented evidence that people performed better using the knowledge management system. It was just hard to get some to use it because they were frustrated with the search and the interface.
James suggested that one of the first steps is to implement search reports. He says that the two most useful are: “most popular search terms” and “failed search terms.” This will let you see what people and want and what they need to paraphrase the Stones. Taxonomies also help with the standardization of key words. This was one of the initiatives we did to improve usages on the underused telecom knowledge management system mentioned above.
I recently met with Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen from the Delphi Group which offers workshops on developing taxonomies, along with many other good things. They agree with James’ point that you cannot just plug and run search engines to get the most effective results. Here is one of their events, Proving Ground for Information Architecture & Taxonomy: Introduction to be held in Florida on March 7-9. Dan has an interesting new blog, BizTechTalk from the Edge to the Core.
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