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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Folksonomies on intranets

I see a lot of intranets. I mean, a lot of intranets. And I talk to a lot of intranet managers, review employee surveys about intranets, and conduct intranet focus groups. Were you to ask me, “What’s the biggest intranet problem?” my answer would be instant and unequivocal: “Employee can’t find what they’re looking for.”

Call it usability, call it navigation, it all comes down to a wide gap between how employees think about information and the way the owners of the information classify it. Does a truck driver in Minneapolis know that the retirement plan is managed by the benefits department which is part of human resources? Would his first stab at finding information on the retirement plan lead him directly to the benefits department’s content on the intranet?

The more I read and think about folksonomies, and the more I use del.icio.us, the more I wonder how long it will take before somebody applies the concept to intranets.

Folksonomies put the power to categorize anything digital into the hands of users. On an intranet, that would mean employees would decide for themselves, once they found a useful bit of content, how it should be categorized.

How might a folksonomy work if our truck driver could save his bookmarks to a del.icio.us-like serve on the intranet? After 10 minutes of frustrated searching, he finally finds the retirement plan information he wanted. Knowing he’ll probably want it again, he adds it to his bookmarks, giving it a tag that is meaningful to him: “retirement.” Now, any employee searching for content on the intranet can enter the word “retirement” into a search engine dedicated to employee-defined content. If enough other employees have labeled the retirement content as “retirement,” the page will be found; never mind that the benefits folks tagged it “401(k).” Another employee might enter a different term, like “pension.” Some other employees have probably applied that tag when saving the content to their bookmark page, making the page discoverable through that path.

Alternatively, a company could offer multiple types of search results through its search engine—one producing the normal results you’d expect of a search engine, the other identifying the results of a folksonomy seach.

In any case, the end result is easier access to information on the intranet and a solution to the biggest problem plaguing intranet managers.

It can’t be that big a deal to develop an internal version of something like del.icio.us. The bigger challenge will be convincing IT that it makes sense to give employees the ability to label content for themselves. Still, I’m going to start counseling clients to look at this as a means of improving intranet usability.

03/22/05 | 2 Comments | Folksonomies on intranets

Comments
  • 1.I've been thinking about this as well. One of the most itneresting aspects of intranets is that on an intranet staff use a small number of resources quite frequently. This means that one of the most common tasks is returning to information, and this is done more frequently than finding the information in the first place. On a large intranet, it could be remarkably useful to allow staff to tag something once they have found it (sort of like many already email the link to themselves or put it in their bookmarks).

    Then if they were tagging things they found useful, we would get information about how they describe them and what the key content needs are...we can then leverage that to help other people find what they are looking for

    Donna Maurer | March 2005

  • 2.Shel, you might find this post on IBM's planned use of folksonomy on their intranet useful. It mirrors many of your thoughts:

    http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/03/ibms_intranet_a.html

    Bud Gibson | March 2005 | Ann Arbor, MI

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