Informasjonsarkitektur

Finding people in large organisationsJørgen Dalen

Finding people in large organisations

Hypotheses

People search: choosing relevance criteria

Suggestion for solution

Discussion

Hypotheses

• In large organizations, 80% of the knowledge is not documented– Knowledge in people’s heads

– Finding the right person might be more important than finding the document

• It is a very difficult task to display the most relevant persons without editorial control (in both search result and on pages)

Choosing relevance criteria

• Use of metadata (organizational unit, competence area etc)

• Free text attributes

• Editorial preferences: the company determines who the domain experts are

• User behavior parameters– Contributions

– Interests

– Judgement of quality

– Relations to content and other people

User behaviour parameters

Complexity

Findability relevance

Social graph

Content consumption

Content quality rating

Content contribution

Content commenting

Implicit links

Bookmarking

Focus at this stage of the project

Suggestions

• Use a consolidated search concept– Where people and content search are part of the same search session

• Use common metadata for both content and people

• Avoid “one trick pony” relevance criteria– People tend to adapt to whatever give them high ranking

– Combine automatic and manual approaches

Suggestion: use common metadata for people and content

Discussion

• What criteria should be used to rank employees?– To avoid manipulation of ranking

– To avoid being unethical