Have ‘Information Graveyards’ got you spooked?

Added by The Editor, 5 months ago.

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They're fast becoming accustomed to the simplicity and effectiveness of internet searches at home, so what makes London firms think that their employees will happily spend hours searching for vital information and data at work?

In a recent study undertaken on behalf of enterprise search software company Sinequa, 59 per cent of office workers in the capital said that the tools they were provided with for searching their own information systems were either "poor" or "very poor". One in three said that there was no best practice for sharing information available, making searching for information ‘time consuming and frustrating.' A further 46 per cent said that information searches within their organisation were ‘generic and not comprehensive.'

London firms, concludes Sinequa, are fast becoming "riddled with information graveyards".

Now, it may be true that Sinequa has a commercial interest in convincing managers to take action over apparently plummeting rates of employee productivity - but who hasn't had the depressing experience of fruitlessly searching for that vital email, invoice or financial report?

What's clear is that if we're fed up, employees of tomorrow will be livid. Logicalis's Real-Time Generation research, conducted last year among 609 UK teenagers aged between 13 and 17, found that this workforce-in-waiting is comprised of avid consumers and sharers of information.

Our conclusion? "Moving away from a culture of personal reward for personal knowledge is essential to compete in an innovation-led knowledge economy, but the process of change must be a strategic management imperative rather than being left to individual responsibility."

That means that, in a forward-thinking organisation, vital information and data must be easy to capture and to retrieve. And one thing is clear: that innovation-led economy won't thrive in a graveyard environment.

Comments

There are currently 3 comments about this blog.

Mandy Shaw, 4 months ago

In response to Victoria's point: enterprise search shouldn't be exposing personal content (an individual's email being the obvious example). If we are to convert information to organisational knowledge, we have to provide not just sophisticated search tools but also easy information sharing mechanisms; and we have to change the culture so that use of these mechanisms is second nature. We're in a stronger position on both of these than we were even a couple of years ago: because of Web 2.0, people are more used to collaborating; and information sharing technologies like Sharepoint are far more widely available.

Victoria, 5 months ago

The problem for most organisations is that the data they have (essentially, its 'knowledge') is unstructured – it’s contained in employee emails, IMs, pdfs and a myriad of other formats that can't be easily searched. So it’s not just a question of persuading people to share knowledge, but enabling them to tap into other people’s knowledge within their organisation, and that's only possible with an easy-to-use but sophisticated search feature.

Simon H, 5 months ago

It's interesting that Microsoft has been making a lot of noise about enterprise search in the last year or so, especially when it comes to warning Google off 'it's patch'. These companies and many others see enterprise, computer and Internet search as the next 'tipping point', so rest assured the technology will just continue to improve. However, as rightly pointed out by Sinequa it's how businesses handle this information once they've got it.