Hi and welcome to my final post on the linkedin discussion on why users cannot find what they are looking for on intranets. This time the emphasis is on synthesis… so let’s get the last few comments done shall we?

Michael Rosager • @ Simon. I agree.
Findability and search can never be better than the content available on the intranet.
Therefore, non-existing content should always be number 1
Some content may not be published with the terminology or language used by the users (especially on a multilingual intranet). The content may lack the appropriate meta tags. – Or maybe you need to adjust your search engine or information structure. And there can be several other causes…
But the first thing that must always be checked is whether they sought information / data is posted on the intranet or indexed by the search engine.

Rasmus Carlsen • in short:
1: Too much content (that nobody really owns)
2: Too many local editors (with less knowledge of online-stuff)
3: Too much “hard-drive-thinking” (the intranet is like a shared drive – just with a lot of colors = a place you keep things just to say that you have done your job)

Nick Morris • There are many valid points being made here and all are worth considering.
To add a slightly different one I think too often we arrange information in a way that is logical to us. In large companies this isn’t necessarily the same for every group of workers and so people create their own ‘one stop shop’ and chaos.
Tools and processes are great but somewhere I believe you need to analyse what information is needed\valued and by whom and create a flexible design to suit. That is really difficult and begins to touch on how organisations are structured and the roles and functions of employees.

Taino Cribb • Hi everyone
What a great discussion! I have to agree to any and all of the above comments. Enabling users to find info can definately be a complicated undertaking that involves many facets. To add a few more considerations to this discussion:
Preference to have higher expectations of intranet search and therefore “blame” it, whereas Google is King – I hear this too many times, when users enter a random (sometimes misspelled) keyword and don’t get the result they wish in the first 5 results, therefore the “search is crap, we should have Google”. I’ve seen users go through 5 pages of Google results, but not even scroll down the search results page on the intranet.
Known VS Learned topics – metadata and user-tagging is fantastic to organise content we and our users know about, but what about new concepts where everyone is learning for the first time? It is very difficult to be proactive and predict this content value, therefore we often have to do so afterwards, which may very well miss our ‘window of opportunity’ if the content is time-specific (ie only high value for a month or so).
Lack of co-ordination with business communications/ training etc (before the fact). Quite often business owners will manage their communications, but may not consider the search implications too. A major comms plan will only go so far if users cannot search the keywords contained in that message and get the info they need. Again, we miss our window if the high content value is valid for only a short time.
I very much believe in metadata, but it can be difficult to manage in SP2007. Its good to see the IM changes in SP2010 are much improved.

Of the next four comments most covered old ground (a sure sign the conversation is now fairly well saturated). Nick says he is making a “a slightly different” point, but I think issues of structure not suiting a particular audience has been covered previously. I thought Taino’s reply was interesting because she focused on the issue of not accounting for known vs. learned topics and the notion of a “window of opportunity” in relation to appropriate tagging. Perhaps this reply was inspired by what Nick was getting at? In any event, adding it was a line call between governance and information architecture and for now, I chose the latter (and I have a habit of changing my mind with this stuff :-).

I also liked Taino’s point about user expectations around the “google experience” and her examples. I also loved earlier Rasmus’s point about “hard-drive thinking” (I’m nicking that one for my own clients Rasmus ). Both of these issues are clearly people aspects, so I added them as examples around that particular theme.

Finally, I added Taino’s “lack of co-ordination” comments as another example of inadequate governance.

Anne-Marie Low • The one other thing I think missing from here (other than lack of metadata, and often the search tool itself) is too much content, particularly out of date information. I think this is key to ensuring good search results, making sure all the items are up to date and relevant.

Andrew Wright • Great discussion. My top 3 reasons why people can’t find content are:
* Lack of meta data and it’s use in enabling a range of navigation paths to content (for example, being able to locate content by popularity, ownership, audience, date, subject, etc.) See articles on faceted classification:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_classification
and
Contextual integration
http://cibasolutions.typepad.com/wic/2011/03/contextual-integration-how-it-can-transform-your-intranet.html#tp
* Too much out-of-date, irrelevant and redundant information
See slide 11 from the following presentation (based on research of over 80 intranets)
http://www.slideshare.net/roowright/intranets2011-intranet-features-that-staff-love
* Important information is buried too far down in the hierarchy
Bonus 2 reasons 🙂
* Web analytics and measures not being used to continuously improve how information is structured
* Over reliance on Search instead of Browsing – see the following article for a good discussion about this
Browse Versus Search: Stumbling into the Unknown
http://idratherbewriting.com/2010/05/26/browse-versus-search-organizing-content-9/

Both Anne and Andrew make good points and Andrew supplies some excellent links too, but all of these issues have been covered in the map so nothing more has been added from this part of the discussion.

Juan Alchourron • 1) that particular, very important content, is not yet on the intranet, because “the” director don’t understand what the intranet stands for.
2) we’re asuming the user will know WHERE that particular content will be placed on the intranet : section, folder and subfolder.
3) bad search engines or not fully configured or not enough SEO applied to the intranet

John Anslow • Nowt new from me
1. Search ineffective
2. Navigation unintuitive
3. Useability issues
Too often companies organise data/sites/navigation along operational lines rather than along more practical means, team A is part of team X therefore team A should be a sub section of team X etc. this works very well for head office where people tend to have a good grip of what team reports where but for average users can cause headaches.
The obvious and mostly overlooked method of sorting out web sites is Multi Variant Testing (MVT) and with the advent of some pretty powerful tools this is no longer the headache that it once was, why not let the users decide how they want to navigate, see data, what colour works best, what text encourages them to follow what links, in fact how it works altogether?
Divorcing design, usability, navigation and layout from owners is a tough step to take, especially convincing the owners but once taken the results speak for themselves.

Most of these points are already well discussed, but I realised I had never made a reference to John’s point about organisational structures versus task based structures for intranets. I had previously captured rationale around the fact that structures were inappropriate, so I added this as another example to that argument within information architecture…

Edwin van de Bospoort • I think one of the main reasons for not finding the content is not poor search engines or so, but simply because there’s too much irrelevant information disclosed in the first place.
It’s not difficult to start with a smaller intranet, just focussing on filling out users needs. Which usually are: how do I do… (service-orientated), who should I ask for… (corporate facebok), and only 3rd will be ‘news’.
So intranets should be task-focussed instead if information-focussed…
My 2cnts 😉

Steven Kent • Agree with Suzanne’s suggestion “Old content is not deleted and therefore too many results/documents returned” – there can be more than one reason why this happens, but it’s a quick way to user frustration.

Maish Nichani • It is interesting to see how many of us think metadata and structure are key to finding information on the intranet. I agree too. But come to think of it, staff aren’t experts in information management. It’s all very alien to them. Not too long ago, they had their desktops and folders and they could find their information when they wanted. All this while it was about “me and my content”. Now we have this intranet and shared folders and all of a sudden they’re supposed to be thinking about how “others” would like to find and use the information. They’ve never done this before. They’ve never created or organized information for “others”. Metadata and structure are just “techie” stuff that they have to do as part of their publishing, but they don’t know why they’re doing it or for what reason. They real problem, in my opinion, is lack of empathy.

Barry Bassnett • * in establishing a corporate taxonomy.1. Lack of relevance to the user; search produces too many documents.3. Not training people in the concept that all documents are not created by the individual for the same individual but as a document that is meant to be shared. e.g. does anybody right click PDFs to add metadata to its properties? Emails with a subject line stat describe what is in it.

Luc de Ruijter • @Maish. Good point about information management.
Q: Who’d be responsible to oversee the management of information?
Shouldn’t intranet managers/governors have that responsibility?
I can go along with (lack of) empathy as an underlying reason why content isn’t put away properly. This is a media management legacy reason: In media management content producers never had to have empathy with participating users, for there were only passive audiences.
If empathy is an issue. Then it proves to me that communication strategies are still slow to pick up on the changes in communication behaviour and shift in mediapower, in the digital age.
So if we step back from technological reasons for not finding stuff (search, meta, office automation systems etc.) another big reason looks around the corner of intranet management: those responsible for intranet policies and strategy.

Most of this discussion covers stuff already represented in the map, although I can see that in this part of the conversation there is a preoccupation with content and its relevance. Maish also makes a couple of good points. First up he makes the point that staff are not experts in information management and don’t tend to think about how someone else might wish to find the information later. He also concludes by stating the real problem is a lack of empathy. I liked this and felt that this was a nice supporting argument to the whole conjecture that “people issues” is a major theme in this discussion, so I added it as a pro.

 

Now we have an interesting bit in the conversation (for me anyway). Terry throws a curveball question. (Side note: Curveball questions are usually asked with genuine intent, but tend to have a negative effect on live meetings. Dialogue Mapping loves curveball questions as it is often able to deflect its negative impacts).

Terry Golding • Can I play devils advocate and ask WHY you feel meta data is so vital? Dont misunderstand me I am not saying that it is not important, but I cant help feeling that just saying meta data as a reason for not finding things is rather a simplification. Let me ask it another way, what is GOOD meta data, can you give examples please ?

Luc de Ruijter • @Terry. Good questions which can have many answers (see all comments above where you’ll find several answers already). Why do library books have labels on their covers? Those labels are in fact metadata (avant la lettre) which help library people ordering their collection, and clients to find titles. How do you create tag clouds which offer a more intuitive and user centered way to navigate a website/blog? By tagging all content with (structured) meta tags.Look around a bit and you’ll see that metadata are everywhere and that they serve you in browsing and retrieving content. That’s why metadata are vital these days.I think there are no strict right and good meta structures. Structures depend on organisational contexts. Some metastructures are very complex and formal (see comments about taxonomies above), others are quite simple.Metadata can enable users to browse information blocks. By comparisson navigation schemes can only offer rigid sender driven structures to navigate to pages.

Andrew Wright • @Terry. Meta data enables content to be found in a number of different ways – not just one as is typical of paper based content (and many intranets as well unfortunately).
For instance, if you advertise a house for sale you may have meta data about the house such as location, number of rooms and price. This then allows people to locate the house using this meta data (eg. search by number of bedrooms, price range, location). Compare this with how houses are advertised in newspapers (ie. by location only) and you can see the benefits of meta data.
For a good article about the benefits of meta data, read Card Sorting Doesn’t Cut the Custard:
http://www.zefamedia.com/websites/card-sorting-doesnt-cut-the-custard/
To read a more detailed example about how meta data can be applied to intranets, read:
Contextual integration: how it can transform your intranet
http://cibasolutions.typepad.com/wic/2011/03/contextual-integration-how-it-can-transform-your-intranet.html

Terry questions the notion of metadata. I framed it as a con against the previous metadata arguments. Both Luc and Andrew answer and I think the line that most succinctly captures the essence of than answer is Andrew’s “Meta data enables content to be found in a number of different ways”. So I reframe that slightly as a pro supporting the notion that lack of metadata is one of the reasons why users can;t find stuff on the intranet.

Next is yours truly…

Paul Culmsee • Hi all
Terry a devils advocate flippant answer to your devils advocate question comes from Corey Doctrow with his dated, but still hilarious essay on the seven insurmountable obstacles to meta-utopia 🙂 Have a read and let me know what you think.
http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm
Further to your question (and I *think* I sense the undertone behind your question)…I think that the discussion around metadata can get a little … rational and as such, rational metadata metaphors are used when they are perhaps not necessarily appropriate. Yes metadata is all around us – humans are natural sensemakers and we love to classify things. BUT usually the person doing the information architecture has a vested interest in making the information easy for you. That vested interest drives the energy to maintain the metadata.
In user land in most organisations, there is not that vested interest unless its on a persons job description and their success is measured on it. For the rest of us, the energy required to maintain metadata tends to dissipate over time. This is essentially entropy (something I wrote about in my SharePoint Fatigue Syndrome post)
http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2011/10/12/sharepoint-fatigue-syndrome/

Bob Meier • Paul, I think you (and that metacrap post) hit the nail on the head describing the conflict between rational, unambiguous IA vs. the personal motivations and backgrounds of the people tagging and consuming content. I suspect it’s near impossible to develop a system where anyone can consistently and uniquely tag every type of information.
For me, it’s easy to get paralyzed thinking about metadata or IA abstractly for an entire business or organization. It becomes much easier for me when I think about a very specific problem – like the library book example, medical reports, or finance documents.

Taino Cribb • @Terry, brilliant question – and one which is quite challenging to us that think ‘metadata is king’. Good on you @Paul for submitting that article – I wouldn’t dare start to argue that. Metadata certainly has its place, in the absence of content that is filed according to an agreed taxonomy, correctly titled, the most recent version (at any point in time), written for the audience/purpose, valued and ranked comparitively to all other content, old and new. In the absence of this technical writer’s utopia, the closest we can come to sorting the wheat from the chaff is classifcation. It’s not a perfect workaround by any means, though it is a workaround.
Have you considered that the inability to find useful information is a natural by-product of the times? Remember when there was a central pool to type and file everything? It was the utopia and it worked, though it had its perceived drawbacks. Fast forward, and now the role of knowledge worker is disseminated to the population – people with different backgrounds, language, education and bias’ all creating content.
It is no wonder there is content chaos – it is the price we pay for progress. The best we as information professionals can do is ride the wave and hold on the best we can!

Now my reply to Terry was essentially speaking about the previously spoken of issue around lack of motivation on the part of users to make their information easy to use. I added a pro to that existing idea to capture my point that users who are not measured on accurate metadata have little incentive to put in the extra effort. Taino then refers to pace of change more broadly with her “natural by-product of the times” comment. This made me realise my meta theme of “people aspects” was not encompassing enough. I retitled it “people and change aspects” and added two of Taino’s points as supporting arguments for it.

At this point I stopped as enough had been captured the the conversation had definitely reached saturation point. It was time to look at what we had…

For those interested, the final map had 139 nodes.

The second refactor

At this point is was time to sit back and look at the map with the view of seeing if my emergent themes were correct and to consolidate any conversational chaff. Almost immediately, the notion of “content” started to bubble to the surface of my thinking. I had noticed that a lot of conversation and re-iteration by various people related to the content being searched in the first place. I currently had some of that captured in Information Architecture and in light of the final map, I felt that this wasn’t correct. The evidence for this is that Information Architecture topics dominated the maps. There were 55 nodes for information architecture, compared to 34 for people and change and 31 for governance.

Accordingly, I took all of the captured rationale related to content and made it its own meta-theme as shown below…

Within the “Issues with the content being searched” map are the following nodes…

I also did another bit of fine tuning too here and there and overall, I was pretty happy with the map in its current form.

The root causes

If you have followed my synthesis of what the dialogue from the discussion told me, it boiled down to 5 key recurring themes.

1. Poor Information Architecture
2. Issues with the content itself
3. People and change aspects
4. Inadequate governance
5. Lack of user-centred design

I took the completed maps, exported the content to word and then pared things back further. This allowed me to create the summary table below:

Poor Information Architecture	Issues with content	People and change aspects	Inadequate governance	Lack of user-centred design
Vocabulary and labelling issues · Inconsistent vocabulary and acronyms · Not using the vocabulary of users · Documents have no naming convention Poor navigation Lack of metadata · Tagging does not come naturally to employees Poor structure of data · Organisation structure focus instead of user task focussed · The intranet’s lazy over-reliance on search	Old content not deleted Too much information of little value Duplicate or “near duplicate” content Information does not exist or an unrecognisable form	People with different backgrounds, language, education and bias’ all creating content Too much “hard drive” thinking People not knowing what they want Lack of motivation for contributors to make information easier to use Google inspired inflated expectations on search functionality on intranet Adopting social media from a hype driven motivation	Lack of governance/training around metadata and tagging Not regularly reviewing search analytics Poor and/or low cost search engine is deployed Search engine is not set up properly or used to full potential Lack of “before the fact” coordination with business communications and training Comms and intranet don’t listen and learn from all levels of the business. Ambiguous, under-resourced or misplaced Intranet ownership The wrong content is being managed There are easier alternatives available	Content is structured according to the view of the owners rather than the audience Not accounting for two types of visitors… task-driven and browse-based No social aspects to search Not making the search box available enough A failure to offer an entry level view Not accounting for people who do not know what they are looking for versus those who do Not soliciting feedback from a user on a failed search about what was being looked for

The final maps

The final map can be found here (for those who truly like to see full context I included an “un-chunked” map which would look terrific when printed on a large sized plotter). Below however, is a summary as best I can do in a blog post format (click to enlarge). For a decent view of proceedings, visit this site.

Poor Information Architecture

Issues with the content itself

People and change aspects

Inadequate governance

Lack of user-centred design

Thanks for reading.. as an epilogue I will post a summary with links to all maps and discussion.

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

Hi all

This is the third post in a quick series that attempts to use IBIS to analyse an online discussion. The map is getting big now, but luckily, we are halfway through the discussion and will have most of the rationale captured by the end of this post. We finished the part 2 with a summary map that has grouped the identified reasons why it is hard to find information on intranets into core themes. Right now there are 4 themes that have emerged. In this post we see if there are any more to emerge and fully flesh out the existing ones. Below is our starting point for part 3.

Our next two responses garnered more nodes in the map than most others. I think this is a testament to the quality of their input to the discussion. First up Dan…

Dan Benatan • Having researched this issue across many diffferent company and departmental intranets, my most frequent findings are:
1. A complete lack of user-centred design. Content that many members of the organization need to access is structured according to the view of the content owners rather than the audience. This should come as no surprise, it remains the biggest challenge in public websites.
2. A failure to offer an entry level view. Much of the content held on departmental intranets is at a level of operational detail that is meaningless to those outside the team. The information required is there, but it is buried so deep in the documents that people outside the team can’t find it.
3. The intranet’s lazy over-reliance on search. Although many of us have become accustomed to using Google as our primary entry point to find content across the web, we may do this because we know we have no hope of finding the content through traditional navigation. The web is simply far too vast. We do not, however, rely purely on search once we are in the website we’ve chosen. We expect to be able to navigate to the desired content. Navigation offers context and enables us to build an understanding of the knowledge area as we approach the destination. In my research I found that most employees (>70%) try navigation first because they feel they understand the company well enough to know where to look.
4. Here I agree with many of the comments posted above. Once the user does try search, it still fails. The search engine returns too many results with no clear indication of their relative validity. There is a wealth of duplicate content on most intranets and , even worse, there is a wealth of ‘near duplicate’ content; some of which is accurate and up-to-date and much that is neither. The user has no easy way to know which content to trust. This is where good intranet management and good metadata can help.

My initial impression was that this was an excellent reply and Dan’s experience shone through it. I thought this was one of the best contributions to the discussion thus far. Let’s see what I added shall we?

First up, Dan returned to the user experience issue, which was one of the themes that had emerged. I liked his wording of the issue, so I also changed the theme node of “Inadequate user experience design” to Dan’s framing of “Lack of user-centred design”, which I thought was better put. I then added his point about content structured to the world view of owner, rather than audience. His second point about an “entry level view” relates to the first point in the sense that both are user centred design issues. So I added the entry level view point as an example…

I added Dan’s point about the intranet’s lazy over-reliance on search to the information architecture theme. I did this because he was discussing the relationship between navigation and search, and navigation had already come up as an information architecture issue.

Dan’s final point about too many results returned was already covered previously, but he added a lot of valuable arguments around it. I restructured that section of the map somewhat and incorporated his input.

Next we have Rob, who also made a great contribution (although not as concise as Dan)

Rob Faulkner • Wow… a lot of input, and a lot of good ideas. In my experience there can be major liabilities with all of these more “global” concepts, however.
No secret… Meta data is key for both getting your site found to begin with, as well as aiding in on-site search. The weak link in this is the “people aspect” of the exercise, as has been alluded to. I’ve worked on interactive vehicles with ungodly numbers of pages and documents that rely on meta data for visibility and / or “findability” (yes, I did pay attention in English class once in a while… forgive me), and the problem — more often than not — stems from content managers either being lazy and doing a half ass job of tagging, if at all, or inconsistency of how things are tagged by those that are gung-ho about it. And, as an interactive property gets bigger, so too does the complexity tagging required to make it all work. Which circles back to freaking out providers into being lazy on the one hand, or making it difficult for anyone to get it “right” on the other. Vicious circle. Figure that one out and you win… from my perspective.
Another major issue that was also alluded to is organization. For an enterprise-class site, thorough taxonomy / IA exercises must be hammered out by site strategists and THEN tested for relevance to target audiences. And I don’t mean asking targets what THEY want… because 9 times out of 10 you’re either going to get hair-brained ideas at best, or blank stares at worst. You’ve just got to look at the competitive landscape to figure out where the bar has been set, what your targets are doing with your product (practical application, OEMing, vertical-specific use, etc… then Test the result of your “informed” taxonomy and IA to ensure that it does, in fact, resonate with your targets once you’ve gotten a handle on it.
Stemming from the above, and again alluded to, be cautious about how content is organized in order to reflect how your targets see it, not how internal departments handle it. Most of the time they are not one in the same. Further, you’ve got to assume that you’re going to have at least two types of visitors… task-driven and browse-based. Strict organization by product or service type may be in order for someone that knows what they’re looking for, but may not mean squat to those that don’t. Hence, a second axis of navigation that organizes your solutions / products by industry, pain point, what keeps you up at night, or whatever… will enable those that are browsing, or researching, a back door into the same ultimate content. Having a slick dynamic back-end sure helps pull this off
Finally, I think a big mistake made across all verticals is what the content consists of to begin with. What you may think is the holy grail, and the most important data or interactive gadget in the world may not mean a hill-of-beans to the user. I’ve conducted enough focus groups, worldwide, to know that this is all typically out of alignment. I never cease to be amazed at exactly what it is that most influences decision makers.
I know a lot of this was touched upon by many of you. Sorry about that… damn thread is just getting too long to go back and figure out exactly who said what!
Cheers…

Now Rob was the first to explicitly mention “People aspects”, and I immediately realised this was the real theme that “Lack of motivation on the part of contributors…”was getting at. So I restructured the map so that “people aspects” was the key theme and the previous point of “Lack of motivation” was an example. I then added Rob’s other examples.

After making his points around people aspects, Rob then covers some areas well covered already (metadata, content organsiation), so I did not add any more nodes. But at the end, he added a point about browse oriented vs. search oriented users, which I did add to the user-centred design discussion.

Rob also made a point about users who know what they want when searching for information vs. those who do not. (In Information Architecture terms, this is called “Known item seeking” vs “exploratory seeking”). That had not been covered previously, so I added it to the Information Architecture discussion.

Finally, I captured Rob’s point about the wrong content being managed in the first place. This is a governance issue since the best Information architecture or user experience design won;t matter a hoot if you’re not making the right content available in the first place.

Hans Leijström • Great posts! I would also like to add lack of quality measurements (e.g. number of likes, useful or not) and the fact that the intranets of today are not social at all…

Caleb Lamz • I think everyone has provided some great reasons for users not being able to find what they are looking for. I lean toward one of the reasons Bob mentions above – many intranets are simply not actively managed, or the department managing it is not equipped to do so.
Every intranet needs a true owner (no matter where it falls in the org chart) that acts a champion of the user. Call it the intranet manager, information architect, collaboration manager, or whatever you want, but their main job needs to be make life easier for users. Responsibilities include doing many of the things mentioned above like refining search, tweaking navigation, setting up a metadata structure, developing social tools (with a purpose), conducting usability tests, etc.
Unfortunately, with the proliferation of platforms like SharePoint, many IT departments roll out a system with no true ownership, so you end up with content chaos.

There is no need to add anything from Hans as he was re-iterating a previous comment about analytics which was captured already. Caleb makes a good point about ownership of content/intranet which is a governance issue in my book. So I added his contribution there…

Dena Gazin • @Suzanne. Yes, yes, yes – a big problem is old content. Spinning up new sites (SharePoint) and not using, or migrating sites and not deleting old or duplicative content. Huge problem! I’m surprised more people didn’t mention this. Here’s my three:
1. Metadata woes (@Erin – lack of robust metadata does sound better as improvements can be remedied on multiple levels)
2. Old or duplicate content (Data or SharePoint Governance)
3. Poorly configured search engine
Bonus reason: Overly complicated UIs. There’s a reason people like Google. Why do folks keep trying to mess up a good thing? Keep it as simple as you possibly can. Create views for those who need more. 80/20 rule!

Dena’s points are a reiteration of previous points, but I did like her “there is a reason people like google” point, which I considered to be a nice supporting argument of the entire user-centric design theme.

Next up we have another group of discussions. What is interesting here is that there is some disagreement – and a lot of prose – but not a lot of information was added to the map from it.

Luc de Ruijter • @Rob. Getting information and metastructures in place requires interactions with the owners of information. I doubt whether they are lazy or blank staring people – I have different experiences with engaging users in preparing digital working environments. People may stare back at you when you offer complete solutions they can say “yea” or “nay” to. And this is still common practice amogst Communication specialists (who like creating stuff themselves first and then communicate about them to others later). And if colleagues stare blank at your proposal, they obviously are resisting change and in need of some compelling communciation campaign…
Communication media legacy models are a root cause for failing intranets.
Tagging is indeed a complex excercise. And we come from a media-age in which fun predominated and we were all journalists and happy bunnies writing post after post, page after page, untill the whole cluttered intranet environment was ready again for a redesign.
Enterprise content is not media content, but enterprise content. Think about it (again please 🙂 ). If you integrate the storage process of enterprise content into the “saving as” routine, you’ll have no problems anymore with keeping your content clean and consistent. All wil be channeled through consistent routines. This doesn’t kill adding free personal meta though, it just puts the content in a enterprise structure. Think enterprise instead of media and tagging solutions are for grabs.
I agree that working on taxonomies can become a drag. Leadership and vison can speed up the process. And mandate of course.
I believe that the whole target rationale behind websites is part of the Communication media legacy we need to loose in order to move forward in better communication services to eployees. Target-thinking hampers the construction of effectve user centered websites, for it focusses on targets, persona, audiences, scenario’s and the whole extra paper media works.
While users only need flexibility, content in context, filters and sorting options. Filtering and sorting are much more effective than adding one navigation tree ater another. And they require a 180° turn in conventional communciation thinking.
@Caleb. Who manages an intranet?
Is that a dedicated team of intranet managers, previously known as content managers, previously known as communciation advisors, previously known as mere journalists? Or is intranet a community affair in which the community IS the manager of content? Surely you want a metamodel to be managed by a specialist. And make general management as much a non-silo activity as possible. Collaboration isn’t confined to silo’s so intranet shouldn’t be either.
A lot of intranets are run by a small group of ‘experts’ whose basic reasoning is that intranet is a medium like an employee magazine. If you want content management issues, start making such groups responsible for intranet.
In my experience intranets work once you integrate them in primary processes. Itranet works for you if you make intranet part of your work. De-medialise the intranet and you have more chance for sustainable success.
Rolling out Sharepoints is a bit like rolling back time. We’ll end up somewhere where we already were in 2001, when digital IC was IT policy. The fact that we are turning back to that situation is a good and worrying illustration of the fact that strategy on digital communications is lacking in the Communications department – otherwise they wouldn’t loose out to IT.
@Dena. I think your bonus reason is a specific Sharepoint reason. Buy Sharepoint and get a big bonus bag of bad design stuff with it – for free! An offer you can’t refuse 🙂

Luc de Ruijter • @Dena. My last weeks tweet about search: Finding #intranet content doesn’t start with #search #SEO. It starts with putting information in a content #structure which is #searchable. Instead of configuring your search engine, think about configuring your content first.

Once again Luc is playing the devils advocate role with some broader musings. I might have been able to add some of this to the map, but it was mostly going over old ground or musings that were not directly related to the question being asked. This time around, Rob takes issue with some of his points and Caleb agrees…

Rob Faulkner • @Luc, Thanks for your thoughtful response, but I have to respectfully disagree with you on a few points. While my delivery may have been a bit casual, the substance of my post is based on experience.
First of all, my characterizations of users being 1) lazy or 2) blank staring we’re not related to the same topic. Lazy: in reference to tagging content. Blank Staring: related to looking to end users for organizational direction.
Lazy, while not the most diplomatic means of description, I maintain, does occur. I’ve experienced it, first hand. A client I’m thinking of is a major technology, Fortune 100 player with well over 100K tech-focused, internet savvy (for the most part) employees. And while they are great people and dedicated to their respective vocation, they don’t always tag documents and / or content-chunks correctly. It happens. And, it IS why a lot of content isn’t being located by targets — internally or externally. This is especially the case when knowledge or content management grows in complexity as result of content being repurposed for delivery via different vehicles. It’s not as simple as a “save as” fix. This is why I find many large sites that provide for search via pre-packed variables, — i.e. drop-downs, check-boxes, radio-buttons, etc — somewhat suspect, because if you elect to also engage in keyword index search you will, many times, come up with a different set of results. In other words, garbage in, garbage out. That being said, you asked “why,” not “what to do about it” and they are two completely different topics. I maintain that this IS definitely a potential “why.”
As far as my “blank stare” remark, it had nothing to do with the above, which you tied it to… but I am more than fluent in engaging and empowering content owners in the how’s and why’s of content tagging without confusing them or eliciting blank stares. While the client mentioned above is bleeding-edge, I also have vast experience with less tech-sophisticated entities — i.e. 13th-century country house hotels — and, hence, understand the need to communicate with contributors appropriate to what will resonate with them. This is Marketing 101.
In regard to the real aim of my “blank stare” comment, it is very germane to the content organization conversation in that it WILL be one of your results if you endeavour to ask end-users for direction. It is, after all, what we as experts should be bringing to the table… albeit being qualified by user sounding boards.
Regarding my thoughts on taxonomy exercises… I don’t believe I suggested it was a drag, at all. The fact is, I find this component of interactive strategy very engaging… and a means to create a defensible, differentiated marketing advantage if handled with any degree of innovation.
In any event, I could go on and on about this post and some of the assumptions, or misinterpretations, you’ve made, but why bother? When I saw your post initially, it occurred to me you were looking for input and perhaps insight into what could be causing a problem you’re encountering… hence the “why does this happen” tone. Upon reviewing the thread again, it appears you’re far more interested in establishing a platform to pontificate. If you want to open a discussion forum you may want to couch your topic in more of a “what are your thoughts about x, y, z?”… rather than “what could be causing x, y, z?” As professionals, if we know the causes we’re on track to address the problem.

Caleb Lamz • I agree with Rob, that this thread has gone from “looking for input” to “a platform to pontificate”. You’re better off making this a blog post rather than asking for input and then making long and sometimes off the cuff remarks on what everyone else has graciously shared. It’s unproductive to everyone when you jump to conclusions based on the little information that other users can provide in a forum post.

Luc de Ruijter • The list:
Adopting social media from a hype-driven motivation (lack of coherence)
big problem with people just PDFing EVERYTHING instead of posting HTML pages
Comms teams don’t listen and learn from all levels of the business
Content is not where someone thought it would be or should be or its not called what they thought it was called or should be called.
content is titled poorly
content managers either being lazy and doing a half ass job of tagging
content they are trying to find is out of date, cannot be trusted or isn’t even available on the intranet.
Documents have no naming convention
failure to offer an entry level view
inconsistency of how things are tagged
Inconsistent vocabulary and acronyms
info is organised by departmental function rather than focussed on end to end business process.
information being searched does not actually exist or exists only in an unrecognisable form and therefore cannot be found!
intranet’s lazy over-reliance on search
intranets are simply not actively managed, or the department managing it is not equipped to do so.
intranets of today are not social at all
just too much stuff
Lack of content governance, meta-data and inconsistent taxonomy, resulting in poor search capability.
Lack of measuring and feedback on (quality, performance of) the intranet
Lack of metadata
lack of motivation on the part of contributors to make their information easy to use
lack of quality measurements (e.g. number of likes, useful or not
lack of robust metadata
lack of robust metadata, resulting in poor search results;
lack of user-centred design
main navigation is poor
not fitting the fact that there are at least two types of visitors… task-driven and browse-based
Not making the search box available enough
Old content is not deleted and therefore too many results/documents returned
Old or duplicate content (Data or SharePoint Governance)
Overly complicated UIs
Poor navigation, information architecture and content sign-posting
Poorly configured search engine
proliferation of platforms like SharePoint
relevance of content (what’s hot for one is not for another)
Search can’t find it due to poor meta data
Search engine is not set up correctly
search engine returns too many results with no clear indication of their relative validity
structure is not tailored to the way the user thinks

Luc de Ruijter • This discussion has produced a qualitative and limited list of root causes for not finding stuff. I think we can all work with this.
@Rob & @Caleb My following question is always what to do after digesting and analysing information. I’m after solutions, that;s why I asked about root causes (and not symptoms). Reading all the comments triggers me in sharing some points of view. Sometimes that’s good to fuel the conversation sometimes. For if there is only agreement, there is no problem. And if there is no problem, what will we do in our jobs? If I came across clerical, blame it on Xmas.
Asking the “what to do with this input?” is pehaps a question for another time.

The only thing I added to the map from this entire exchange is Rob’s point of no social aspects to search. I thought this was interesting because of an earlier assertion that applying social principles to an intranet caused more silos. Seems Luc and Rob have differing opinions on this point.

Where are we at now?

At this point, we are almost at the end of the discussion. In this post, I added 25 nodes against 10 comments. Nevertheless, we are not done yet. In part 4 I will conclude the synthesis of the discussion and produce a final map. I’ll also export the map to MSWord, summarising the discussion as it happened. Like the last three posts, you can click here to see the maps exported in more detail.

There are four major themes that have emerged. Information Architecture, People aspects, Inadequate governance and lack of user-centred design. The summary maps for each of these areas are below (click to enlarge):

Information Architecture

People aspects

Inadequate Governance

Lack of user-centred design

Thanks for sticking with me thus far – almost done now…

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au