Martin White has gained international reputation over the last twenty years for his understanding of how to manage enterprise and intranet search applications for the benefit of the organisation.
Martin has written four of the five books on enterprise search management, including Making Search Work in 2008 and the second edition of Enterprise Search in 2015. His report on Achieving Enterprise Search Satisfaction was published in 2018 and he is currently writing a book about the Enterprise Search Experience. He is the author of a monthly search column in CMSWire and is Editor of Informer, the newsletter of the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group. Martin has been a Visiting Professor at the Information School, University of Sheffield, since 2002, specialising in information management and interactive information retrieval (IIR).
“All our experts have prepared profiles”
about expertise and how it might be husbanded, to look at what organisations should be demanding of systems designers and those charged with identifying exper- tise and optimising the use of knowledge of new employees, the ‘onboarding process’. I’ve also asked James Robertson, MD and Founder of the much-acclaimed Step Two to look into the opportunities for improving the onboarding experi- ence of employees through the lens of digital approaches and solutions.
Martin: Before I talk about onboarding and value of connecting to experts, I have to highlight the wisdom from Dave Snowden on the extent to which we can write down what we know. We cannot judge to what extent we are experts, as expertise is relative, not absolute. It is of note that the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance runs to almost 1,000 pages – there are no easy definitions of levels of expertise. It is also well worth reading a report from the US consulting organisation MITRE, which published a report on Expert Finding Sys- tems in 2006, which interestingly remains in print. The vendors may have changed but the issues remain the same.
The myth of the lonely employee Much is made by enterprise search ven- dors (including Microsoft) of the value of enterprise search to find experts. This is sadly pure PR. I call it The Myth of the Lonely Employee. If they need assistance they should be going back to their manager for support. They will not have enough information to define the nature of the problem, nor to assess the relative value of different ‘experts’ that they may find. Let me look next at the onboarding of someone with significant expertise to fill a vacancy or a new position. They will at least have the business experience to be able to use the intranet, social networks and search applications as they will have
April-May 2021
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 43
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