Intranet search is a horrendous task because people neither want their content to get found nor the organization value the importance of finding, or both.
That is why many of the best organizations in the world have such web search engines. They seem to share the same quality of search which is astonishingly bad and nobody’s in charge more really care.
With search as really important, how in this day and age organization with 20, 40 or even 60 thousand employees do not have a single full time resource allocator for helping staff find what they need on the intranet?
A good example is the continuation of Google as the world’s most dominant brand in the world search engines. Simply because it is just a search engine! All it does is help people find what they need quickly which is the first and foremost step in getting stuff done.
It is time to get real about search and grab it by the horn. But it is search that we need to manage per say, it is more important the “find-ability” of what we are search for. We can only achieve that by identifying the most popular searches on the local intranets and measure how findable they currently are. This can only be achieved by focusing on how the intranet can help ones staff find what they need for doing their jobs.
Concentrate on the key factors that enable the organization run more efficiently and how findable are these things on the organization’s intranet. Focus on eliminating unnecessary wasted time specially for the sales and/or marketing departments.
The core of the intranet is the content and most of the time the people who create the content don’t really care if it is found or not. There is no competition to get found like there is on the Web.
Organizational job descriptions are: Your job is to write this. Your job is to put this up on the intranet. Once the content is written and published on the intranet, then the job is over. If the content can’t be quickly found then it was a total waste of time to publish it in the first place.
Organizations have to stop measuring people on the amount of content they publish. They have to adopt a new way to measure them on the findability of that content. Better yet, once found measure them on the usefulness of the content. So, you published all these marketing images. Is the sales department actually using any of them in their sales presentations?