Do you worry about the content you can’t find?

Do you worry about the content you can’t find?  If you can’t find the information, how can you possibly manage it?  Can you afford to take that risk?

Many organisations find it difficult to see the benefits from publishing standards.  I remove the barriers to show the benefits from each publishing standard in this series of posts.  Publishing standards aim to:

• Reduce the risk of sensitive information leaks
• Improve the overall user experience
• Make people using your intranet more satisfied with it
• Improve people’s productivity
• Improve people’s quality of work

It is vital that all information is easy to find by people who need to use it for their work. The amount of extra effort required by a content owner to publish findable content is minimal. However, the impact can be dramatic for the people who need to use it. It is important your intranet search engine can give content the right priority so people can find it using logical words or phrases.

In my experience intranet search engines have received an undeserved press by people using them to find or rather not able to find the content they need. People’s expectations have risen with their internet experience with little consideration of how Google achieves this. There is a phrase I have heard many times to explain this problem of “garbage in – garbage out” which I can understand.

As well as search engines you can use global and site menus to help people navigate quickly to information and tools they need to use.  An A-Z or coproate wiki can also help by providing a central source of knowledge with links to various parts of your intranet or digital workplace for easy journeys.

Benefits

Knowing that you are helping people find the right information gives three main benefits:

1. People using your intranet will save time by finding the information more easily. Having a publishing standard on findability that encourages content owners to use all available tools to help people reinforces this.
2. For you it is also important you can reinforce the right behaviour with content editors by having mandatory fields for metadata. This supports your guidance that sets out why it is worthwhile adding metadata and the content to your A-Z.
3. Your organisation can be confident of improving productivity with a good search engine and its scope means there is all published content is searchable and indexed.