Getting what you want on the intranet

One of the biggest complaints employees voice about intranets is: “I know what I’m looking for is probably out there, but I can’t find it.”

Social tagging – the process of adding metadata to documents, photos and so on, could be the answer – in that it would supplement the more traditional search capabilities inherent to most intranets (primarily a navigational structure and a search engine) with different ways to find the content most relevant to each user.

Bursting with millions of pages
Most intranets are bursting with millions of pages of content – it’s a dense mass of information and it’s often arranged in a messy or counter-intuitive way. But social tagging allows the people who use that intranet every day to navigate their colleagues (who have the same needs, desires and, more likely than not, the same way of thinking about the content) straight through the labyrinth to the pages they want. And what if employees could tag content they find so other employees could find the same page by using the same natural language? Here’s one example of how it might work.

Example: Social tagging in action
An employee – let’s call her Lucy – is looking for a policy on the intranet that deals with employee travel. Why can’t she find it? Because it’s categorized under “Employee Work Policies” and is helpfully entitled “Business T&E Guidelines”.

After some struggle and maybe a phone call to the right department, Lucy finds the policy. Knowing others are likely to experience the same difficulty she had, Lucy bookmarks the policy on the company’s intranet bookmark page and gives it two distinct tags: “travel” and “travel policy”.

Now, any employee who conducts a search of the bookmarks page with either of those keywords will find Lucy’s bookmark and go right to the travel policy. Similarly, Lucy could let it be known that she has found the elusive travel page, and colleagues would simply call up Lucy’s bookmarks in order to find the policy.

Agreeing to common tags
There’s more a company could do with a social bookmarking site on the intranet. Teams could agree to common tags in order to share knowledge. For example, process engineers could set up a “processengineering” tag that would aggregate in one place all the web pages – internal and external – that would be useful to process engineers.

There’s a lot of content out there, but as long as there’s a simple way of getting to the specific pieces you want, the amount of available content ceases to be an issue – and social tagging provides that route.

Best regards,

Alex Manchester, Editor
alex.manchester@melcrum.com

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