March 11, 2010

American Pickers and Corporate Intranets

Not sure why I like this show but it has my attention every Monday night. American Pickers comes on the History channel and is basically a show of a couple of guys looking for antiques in piles and piles of junk. Anything that they can sell, they buy, from old bikes to metal advertising signs. The best shows seem to center around the guys digging through 10 feet of rubble or cutting back kudzu to find that special item. Their ability to spot something of value in a large pile of junk is nothing short of astonishing which brings me to my analogy; our intranet.

Is our intranet a big pile of rusted junk? Many think so since it seems to have very little information architecture or overall data strategy. A simple search for collaboration yields 13,658 results out of 772,000 sources. Imagine 13,000 rusted car parts sitting in a yard and you want that 1942 Desoto Hood Ornament. Are you going to sort through each and every one? We brag about the amount of information we have and we may have as much as 7 million pages of content ready to be absorbed. And, that’s just the stuff that's captured by the search engine which is estimated to only be about 10%. Could it be, we have 70 million document artifacts wandering around in the Corporate junk yard?

Now, what skills do you need to be an Corporate Information Picker? The ability to find the exact document, web site, or person you need is a rare skill indeed. Although it wouldn't make good television, it would be funny asking a new employee to see if they can find the process for ordering a laptop, getting office supplies, signing up for discounts, or finding the metadata expert within this 300,000 person sea of knowledge. I wonder how much productive time is wasted sifting through the junk looking for the right piece of information. Hey, look what I found! Sweet, a 1980's Executive Manual printed in dot matrix print. This should come in handy. I wonder if it has any value?

Posted by Todd at March 11, 2010 6:50 AM

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