Learning [Information Architecture] From the Internet Giants
At first glance this article, Learning From the Internet Giants, from the latest MIT Sloan Management Review (costs $6) looks like any other run-of-the mill article on some new Internet hype and thus not worth reading. This is exactly what went through my mind. But when I saw Larry Prusak's name as one of the authors, I decided to download and read the article. Larry is a KM guy and I wanted to know what he's doing with an article like this. It turns out that this article is on Information Architecture (IA), although surprisingly the discipline is never mentioned in any specific detail. The problem tackled in this paper is that of "findability", although this also is never mentioned in the paper. Here's the premise of the paper: "IDC estimated that an organization employing 1,000 knowledge workers might easily incur a cost of more than $6 million in lost productivity as employees fail to find existing knowledge they need, waste time searching for nonexistent knowledge and recreate knowledge that is available but could not be located. Imagine the impact on an organization of 50,000 or more employees." The authors' solution to this malady is to study how Amazon.com, eBay and Google solve their customers problems by offering superior search and find experiences. Here are their recommendations.
What strikes me hard about this paper is the complete ignorance about the existence of the discipline of IA, whose main goal is to solve the findability issue. On the positive side however, I think this paper will be an ideal one to give senior managers and decision makers to think about their knowledge worker productivity in terms of findability and then follow them up with a talk on IA.
Permalink | Monday, August 30, 2004
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