Social Glass

1994: WebCrawler and Lycos became the first widely adopted search engines.  They flattened the Internet giving all resources an equal chance of being discovered.  Before search engines, people were meant to find content by going to “what’s new” web pages where they’d find hyperlinks to web pages that had been recently added.  From those pages they’d find links to other pages and so on.  The Internet, at least at its conception, was meant to be surfed from site to site, not flattened.  But search engines proved there was a much more efficient, comprehensive way to find information.

And I continue, bewildered, that companies follow the pre-Lycos model when constructing their intranets.  For some reason they always try to consolidate information into knowledge management “silos” like Documentum.  They set policies that change the homepage of their worker’s browsers to be the landing page for the new intranet portal which has “everything an employee will ever need to know” buried deep within.  And then they wonder why nobody uses these new solutions.

It’s because they can’t find anything.

Data will always be federated, scattered across many information systems, just as it is on the Internet.  Instead of investing in building a one size fits all intranet, invest in procuring and deploying an enterprise search engine.  Let it crawl the file share.  Let it crawl Lotus Notes.  Let it crawl the shiny new Documentum application.  Then set policies changing the worker’s homepage to the new enterprise search application if you must.  And make that search page simple.  Nobody understands taxonomies nor will they spend the time to.  Forget faceting.  Follow Google’s example making search dead simple. See what happens then.  A search for “jury duty” might actually produce a result that tells the worker how much compensation he’s entitled to if summoned.

And I’ll bet your workers will be much less pissed off that you changed their browser’s default homepage.