EMBEDDING WIKIS, TAGGING AND RSS ON YOUR INTRANET

Knowledge Management Review, Mar/Apr 2007 by Manchester, Alex

"Folksonomies" is the word coined to describe this bottom up process of tagging and categorization. It's increasingly seen as an adjunct or possibly even a replacement for conventional top-down taxonomies. As social computing spreads in business, the need for RSS, tags and folksonomies becomes critical.

Implications of tagging and folksonomies

The number one complaint employees voice about intranets remains the same: "I know what I'm looking for is probably out there, but I can't find it."

Social tagging could be the answer - in that it would supplement the more traditional search capabilities inherent to most intranets (primarily a navigational structure and a search engine) with different ways to find the content most relevant to each user.

As we plow through the technology age, intranets are bursting with millions of pages of content - it's a dense mass of information and it's often arranged in a messy or counter-intuitive way. But social tagging allows the people who use that intranet every day to navigate their colleagues (who have the same needs, desires and, more likely than not, the same way of thinking about the content) straight through the labyrinth to the pages they want.

How might social tags be applied to the intranet? Let's look at intranet bookmarks. One of the key problems with rigid navigation and search engines on intranets is that they require employees to know the label under which the content was categorized or the keyword that will produce the desired search result.

Developing tags with local language

But what if employees could tag content they find so other employees could find the same page by using the same natural language? Here's one example of how it might work.

An employee - let's call her Lucy - is looking for a policy on the intranet that deals with employee travel. Why can't she find it? Because it's categorized under "Employee Work Policies," and is helpfully entitled "Business T&E Guidelines."

After some struggle and maybe a phone call to the right department, Lucy finds the policy. Knowing others are likely to experience the same difficulty she had, Lucy bookmarks the policy on the company's intranet bookmark page and gives it two distinct tags: "travel" and "travel policy."

Now, any employee who conducts a search of the bookmarks page with either of those keywords will find Lucy's bookmark and go right to the travel policy. Similarly, Lucy could let it be known that she has found the elusive travel page, and colleagues would simply call up Lucy's bookmarks in order to find the policy.

There's more a company could do with a social bookmarking site on the intranet. Teams could agree to common tags in order to share knowledge. For example, process engineers could set up a "processengineering" tag that would aggregate in one place all the web pages - internal and external that would be useful to process engineers.

Again, we return to the same theme - this is another technology that allows us to upend the "information overload" model. Yes, there's a lot of content out there. But as long as there's a simple way of getting to the specific pieces you want, the amount of available content ceases to be an issue and social tagging provides that route.