I was in a meeting last week and sat with the information architect for a portal at a very large company. She was describing her problems around what she called “category creep”. Their site had started with a fresh taxonomy agreed upon by all the business units. Over time however, the site became complex and convoluted with new categories being added all the time.
Changes in the market, executive mandates, user’s navigation needs, and content creators all kept feeding more categories like weeds in the corporate garden. They realized they had to go back to the information architecture drawing board and “re-categorize” the whole taxonomy, as well as to align to a new sales process to improve sales effectiveness. She did not look happy about this project, as she knew it was only going to happen again six months later. It reminded me of a meeting from earlier that week at an even larger company, where they were explaining to me how their “O” drive turned into the “O-No” drive, which spurred this post.
Both situations got me to thinking about when I got a brand new laptop. I started out at “My documents”, and then begin a basic structure of folders as I created or downloaded content. As I built out my folders it was somewhat like a game of Scrabble, constantly looking to add folders based on a new piece of content, and where it could fit in the tree. That (sometimes) worked fine for just my stuff as I created the structure, but this week I had to use my coworker’s computer on a plane. I needed a file, went down 3 wrong paths to find it, and finally had to do the airplane shuffle to his seat and ask him where it was. The way he organized information wasn’t bad either, in fact I would say it may have even been more logical than mine, it was just different. He brought up a pretty scary point and said “what if YouTube was folder based?”
No two people think about content the same way, and that’s ok. If you lined up 10 sellers in a room, and asked them how to categorize a case study, you’d get at least five answers. So, why do companies still rely on folder based systems for their enterprise portals, content management systems, etc? Another good question is how much time are your sellers spending just searching for information? The CMO council says about two days a week. I think the scariest question to ask them is what they do when they can’t find what they need for a sales conversation. In studies I’ve seen from clients and analysts alike, the answers are typically in this order:
1) “Run the Corporate Maze” or what I like to call “Fishing with Dynamite”. Sellers email or call everyone they know in the organization, without knowing if these people really know where the content lives or what the answer is. I have yet to see a fully comprehensive study on network drain due to front line redundant requests in the field, but would love one. Some anecdotes are in a large Healthcare organization I spoke with was that 40% of their marketers time was spent reacting to these fire drills. There’s another study I read once that says about 70% of requests for information via email fail.
2) “Become a Writer”. Out of sheer necessity a seller suddenly becomes a marketer and the brand ambassador creating your message. Or even worse, they become your product and services managers, creating somewhat accurate solutions. The AMA states that only 10-20% of sellers can actually create the “best message”, and to be honest there may be even less who actually know how to properly use PowerPoint, Word, or PDF.
3) “Ignore it and leave it out”. I don’t know about you, but every time I’ve asked a seller a question and they dodged the answer they’ve lost credibility and I have immediately asked their competitor the same question. An IDC study also confirmed that this was one of the highest reasons why buyers think sellers are wasting their time.
So the question is why do businesses force their users to adopt dated folder structures?
The “Web 2.0” tagging concept of using keywords as labels has been around for quite some time and provides a more straightforward solution for obtaining information. However, even with tagging a consistent corporate language and intelligent organization of categories of information is very important. The thought behind this is critical to the discoverability of information. What we do with SAVO is offer the ability for corporate sponsored tags that administrators can use to create menus and structure. At the same time users can also generate personal tags to find information in a manner best suited for the way they think and work. SAVO allows for the ability to tag anything, including people who are experts. The use of personal tags allows administrators the ability to see how “the crowd” is tagging content with Tag Clouds, and consistently improve the discoverability of content by mass editing categories.
Tagging is just one of the great Web 2.0 applications of to help push information by sales situation; however there are many more that can be covered in future posts. Things like looking at the real usage and freshness of content and pushing by popularity, star rating, or modified date. Easy to build pages built off of queries of the data, commenting, RSS feeds, author or expert pages, and subscriptions are a few more. And obviously every system needs a strong “Google-Like” search engine that doesn’t even require tagging.
The point is everyone thinks about what content they need differently, and many homegrown systems or and architecture’s go directly against this fact. Should we constantly have to guess at how people want information delivered and cause catastrophic network drain and inefficiency, or put down the shovels and start discovering ways to be more effective?
