The Explore Feature: Unlocking Productivity Through Search

When McKinsey wrote a report in July 2012 entitled The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies, they understood that raising the productivity of knowledge workers is the most powerful application of social technologies. 

 

They noted in their report: “The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. But when companies use social media internally, messages become content; a searchable record of knowledge can reduce, by as much as 35 percent, the time employees spend searching for company information.”

 

However, it turned out that employees do NOT need another Facebook, and that accessing information and files is still a time-consuming task.

 

Why?

 

There are many answers to that question, but the most frequent one is “Too many irrelevant results.”.

 

How do we quickly refine those results?

 

 

Let us give you an example. Say you work in the water industry. Your division had a meeting last week about the new desalination processes and their costs. There is a document outlining those findings and you need to locate it to create budget proposals for the next year.

 

If you search by keyword, by merely typing “desalination” you’ll get plenty of results. But by simply filtering those results to exclude everything but documents, as we did in our infographic, you’ll locate your document quicker.

 

If you have an excellent taxonomy in place, (if you don’t, read this article on simple expertise taxonomies) it will be even easier for you to filter the results further and pinpoint that document in no time. 

 

Yep, it’s that simple.