Is IT Really Clueless?
June 25th, 2007by Jeremy Thomas
Update: Paula and Jevon make a good point that Search on its own is not Enterprise 2.0.
I find it interesting reading about IT being clueless when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 (like Paula Thornton’s recent post over at the FASTForward blog). I do a lot of work in the Enterprise Search space (Search being the first “S” in SLATES), and more often than not we are approached by IT departments looking for a Search solution. They understand the difficulty knowledge workers face in finding enterprise content. I’ve worked closely with several IT departments to integrate Search on their intranets - a task that is very security intensive as Search musn’t expose knowledge workers to content they don’t have access to, and this means close involvement with IT.
I’ve written about this before as have others, but Enterprise Search needs to be the focal point of any Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem. Companies should invest in Search first - they must enable discovery - before collaboration can happen. I applaud the IT departments I’ve dealt with in taking this first step.
So no, I don’t think IT is really clueless.
Follow Me
June 25th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Buying a technology and ’standing it up’ does in no way address the key issues. I can list by personal experience, repeated examples where IT bought all the requisite technologies but assumes that they only have to be technically administered. They did not (as it is beyond their ‘normal’ realm of responsilbility) hire the corresponding resources to ‘optimize’ these technologies to the specifics of the business. The implementations added no value.
This flaw is a theme that even Forrester has been writing about of late.
June 25th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
I think one of the themes I see in your post, and in IT when they try to solve business problems, is that applying something that is a known (like Search) somehow helps push the boat of social software closer to the water.
The truth, and this is something I have said to FAST and others, is that right now, finding things is not the problem. All of those search implementations that you, I and others have helped with are there to search information that is 90% useless. Organizations take a lot of pride in their vast repositories of information, and making it searchable makes everyone feel good, but the truth is that users have little use for it. At least not in a sustained way.
“search” being part of Enterprise 2.0, or Enterprise Social Computing, is a bit of a misnomer. Searching through old document repositories is not an Enterprise 2.0 proposition. (ok, still trying to get away from that term!)
What is the relevant Enterprise 2.0 conversation? The conversation that really takes us to new ground?
* How can we help users create more content and how do we make that content searchable by an enterprise search tool.
* How to we let users share their searches, and tag their results so others can learn along with them?
* What does a user’s social network tell us that can inform their search results?
June 26th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Interesting comments and I agree with the both of you. What I didn’t discuss in my post was how “Search” was sold to the IT departments. We position it as the first step in developing a collaborative, social ecosystem. Knowledge workers need a platform to find content and each other before they can collaborate - I think we’d all agree on that point. And it’s with this position that IT departments we’ve dealt with have proceeded with Search implementations.
But you’re right, search on its own isn’t social and it’s not Enterprise 2.0. In my experience, however, search is quite useful, especially when organizations don’t already have an Enterprise Search capability. I’ve seen clients use Google Enterprise Search to, say, find 40 documents about “project X” they didn’t know existed or how to find before. So the speed at which content can be found adds value, but the knowledge worker must still make a judgment call as to how useful the content actually is. Here you’re right, Jevon, this is where shared searches, tagging and social bookmarking can add tremendous value.
July 3rd, 2007 at 2:11 pm
I agree with Jeremy’s point that finding other people is the first issue. But in lieu of that, you also need to ‘do’ stuff, but you first need to know what organization is responsible for what you need to do. Heaven forbid we could get directly to the action or the content. And why can’t we? The variables are endless and the attention is missing. In organization after organization the key ‘wrongs’ are different. At least at Texas Instruments they’ve created a sure-fire workaround: a one-stop triage, phone or email — have a problem, start there and it gets routed to the right part of the organization. Better than countless paths to nowhere.
August 7th, 2007 at 5:58 am
Interesting article!
Where can I find more on this theme?