Intranet Benchmarking Forum

A-Z Indexes on Intranets

In an age of rapidly growing intranets, locating a piece of information on an intranet can be akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Primary navigation invariably still relies to a greater or lesser degree  on knowledge of the organisation and how it is structured, despite the onward march of task-based navigation. And content search, which can perform well for the average user on the Web, tends to perform less well on intranets, though search tools are improving. So it is always a breath of fresh air to find a well-designed A-Z or keyword index on an intranet.

While some people regard the A-Z as a quaint relic of a bygone age - perhaps those same people who predicted the death of the book in an online world - I have taken a lifelong interest in the back-of-book index and its transformation into an online tool. (Indeed I was for some years a member of the Society of Indexers.)

Indexes can deal with synonyms, with graphics, and with inferences, they can distinguish between homographs, and between the trivial and the significant. They have long been recognised as an excellent tool enabling users to find information quickly and easily. And while entire countries have managed to get by without widespread use of indexes - indexes tend to be a bit of an Anglo-American thing - we are now seeing the indexing profession spreading to developing economies such as China.

A-Z indexes are popular with the majority of intranet users, but they are particularly helpful for newer members of staff - who lack background knowledge of organisation hierarchies - and infrequent users.

At last week's IBF member event, where we held a session that included some coverage of A-Z indexes, there was considerable debate about the pros and cons of indexes and around how to make them more usable, far more than can be summarised here. So I'll focus on just a few points:

• An index has human intelligence behind it, while a concordance created automatically is merely a list of words with few of the benefits of a true index. Check out the American Society of Indexers own website A-Z index for an example of a true index done well.
• Make your index easy to use. For example, there's no excuse for providing tiny letters to click on, with insufficient space between them.
• Once you've got a good index, support your investment, don't hide it away. Give it a prominent position along with other important finding tools, such as Search. On the BBC website, you'll find the link to the A-Z right next to the Search text box, as part of the pervasive navigation.
• Indexes can be educational, leading users to explore and discover new material of interest without the risk of 'getting lost'.

Back in 1859, the then British Lord Chancellor pronounced,

So essential do I consider an Index to be to every book, that I proposed to bring a Bill into Parliament to deprive an author who publishes a book without an Index of the privilege of copyright; and, moreover, to subject him, for his offence, to a pecuniary penalty.

And William Casey, former Director of the CIA, was of the opinion that,

If there is no index, the book is probably not worth reading.

But A-Z indexes are not the answer for every intranet. They are not particularly good at dealing with fast-changing content, for example, and they do require regular maintenance (and therefore resources) if they are to continue to be useful and used.

Wikinomics Predicts

This week sees the UK publication of Wikinomics, a  book by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams first published in the US last December. The main idea in Wikinomics is that firms may in the future be able to benefit from collaboration on a mass scale, which they predict "is set to change every institution in society".

We have seen such predictions before, and the business books market is awash with gurus selling their own pet theory. Tapscott and Williams do, however, have some real-world examples to pull out of the hat in support of their arguments.

Many people will already know the story behind the Linux operating system, but there are other lesser-known examples in more traditional sectors. Tapscott and Williams describe how gold mining company Goldcorp used collaboration on a mass scale - and also released a considerable amount of intellectual property - to solve its intractable gold exploration problems. The result, apparently, was way more gold than they expected and a major increase in share price.

Around 18 months ago, I conducted some research for IBF that concluded that wikis were proving to be a particularly useful tool within some large organisations, with some firms studied already seeing significant benefit from their use, albeit still within fairly narrow areas of application. I can’t say I was surprised: at around the same time, an organisation that I help to run had already been using wikis for some time for developing and organizing all kinds of internal and external information, and the benefits were quite clear to me – although it has to be said we’d tried various wiki platforms in search of wiki perfection.

What Tapscott and Williams bring out is the role played not just by mass scale, but by some degree of permeability of the organisation. The answers in the case of Goldcorp came not from within, but by putting ideas generated from a wide spectrum of individuals who were not within the organisation together with what the organisation knew, to create more than a sum of the parts.

This raises a whole series of issues, such as when we should document things that might previously not have been documented, to the nature of intellectual property and its relationship to the organisation. It has often been assumed that it is what is not documented or generally known that is valuable information. And it is generally assumed that everything the organisation knows needs to be highly protected behind layers of secrecy (and legal protection). But the result is often that people within an organisation who would benefit from certain information do not have access to it.

In some areas of business and the professions, controlled sharing with rivals as well as colleagues is becoming more common. The Wall Street Journal last week reported on Sermo, a networking site used by medical professionals to, for example, help with diagnoses. As yet, there are few such specialized networking sites, with experts and professionals in many fields still reliant on mailing lists and other earlier generation tools to conduct this dialogue. This is likely to change as social tools become more integrated and easier to use, and hence more useful and used.

Facebook use and abuse

Much is currently being made in the media of the time employees are 'wasting' on social networking website Facebook, and the security risks that social networking sites pose to the organisation and to the knowledge of its employees. Indeed, Sophos last week reported its own research indicating that some 50% of firms are now blocking Facebook, in an attempt to save employees from themselves.

The jury is most definitely still out on Facebook. On the one hand, it in so many ways resembles its predecessors, Orkut, LinkedIn and a long line of et ceteras, though perhaps it has achieved greater mass within organisations than many earlier networking sites. So what's new? Well, the API is useful for generating rapid application developments, and this feature is leading to constant development of third party applications. And Facebook does have fairly well thought out and sophisticated privacy settings, though it's up to individuals to set them appropriately. Certain features of Facebook, such as the Groups function, are generally agreed to not meet most users' requirements, though applications are continuously under development. Putting data into Facebook is a one-way trip: it is just another walled garden. And finally, the Facebook terms and conditions would put the wind up any corporate lawyer. Check out the summary provided by my colleague Mike Butcher, but essentially, 'all your base are belong to us'. So something of a mixed bag.

On the other hand, Facebook is being taken seriously by some players. At least one CIO of international repute is now encouraging his employees around the world to work through Facebook when internal systems go down (presumably within the Facebook network created for his organisation). And I don't think I'm revealing any organisation secrets here, as he did welcome this move on his Facebook status message ;-).

Outside the private sector, the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce - commonly abbreviated to RSA - is now seriously looking at adopting Facebook, or other social tools such as Ning, to enable the RSA's thousands of geographically dispersed Fellows to run groups and networks, and develop their activities and projects. The RSA has limited funds, and is reluctant to waste effort on trying to build and then maintain its own systems if it can find the right social tool that provides appropriate functionality, flexibility, and usability. Though developing specialised applications for Facebook may be on the agenda. You can, of course, follow - and join in - the online discussion on Facebook.

While pulling up the Web-based networking drawbridge may appeal to some organisations, it is difficult to keep up with the rapid developments in this area: the exercise is akin to using a sieve to hold back a river. Filters may focus on the flavour of the day, but do those organisations know how much time those same staff are spending on Twitter? Or Pownce? Or...?

My own experience is that the majority of my 'friends' on Facebook are in some way work-related, and while there is some water-cooler conversation, it's also a great way to get really useful information, such as where to find a good wi-fi hotspot in a location you don't know; or to distribute information widely among a community of interest without invading everybody's over-stretched inboxes. And the sophistication and usability is better than that found on the average intranet.

I'd also suggest that much that is good or useful has passed from the Web to intranets, but I find it hard to think of innovations that have travelled in the opposite direction. Facebook now houses substantial employee networks for some large organisations. And in any case, we don't just deal with people within our own walls in our daily work. Rather than banning Web-based social networks and all their works, a good set of guidelines, and perhaps some exploration of potential uses, shortcomings, and lessons for the organisation may be a better investment.