Stunning News: Unfindable Content Does Not Get Used
June 8, 2010
Thump. That was the sound of this plump goose body hitting the ground. I toppled over after reading “Full Text Search for Rich Media Content Improves Productivity.” The main idea of the Network World write up is:
…Much of the [online] training doesn’t get used. Why? Because the people it’s intended for can’t find precisely what they want, when they want it. With thousands of courses, students don’t want to wade through paragraph-long course descriptions and hope to find the training right materials. As a result, important knowledge stays locked up in videos and presentations, rarely to be shared.
Translation: If you can’t find information in electronic form, you can’t use it. If you know it is “there,” you can hunt for the missing video or article. But that takes time. Time is money as law firm partners eager to buy a third house in Belize often say.
Not surprisingly, the “cost” of not finding unfindable content is calculated with one of those quite popular “estimates”. Here’s the passage:
Ted Cocheu, CEO of Altus Learning Systems, says that people spend 20% of their time looking for information and they find what they are looking for less than half of the time. That’s equivalent to spending 10 weeks a year searching for information and remaining ignorant half of that time. Altus Learning increases productivity by helping companies to catalog and share verbal information. The materials are referenceable when someone is ready to consumer it.
My view is that the cost of unfindable content is not known. Guesses are interesting, even fun and certainly easy. The reality is that bone head mistakes can have significant financial implications. My hunch is that if I were to root around in email related to the oil spill, I would be able to pinpoint information that would cast light on the problem before the explosion. Other examples of the cost of unfindable information are easy to locate.
Let’s face it. Creating and information object is valueless unless another person can locate that information object. How many of these situations have you encountered:
- Your pet consultant scrambles to locate an email with an attachment you sent the little eager beaver with the azure pelt. The frantic search takes place in front of you, not in a place where your vision won’t reach.
- Your boss asks you for a document needed for that afternoon’s meeting. You have zero clue where the original is, so you make phone calls to people whom you hope have the information. Unlike the azure chip maven, you make the call from outside the boss’s office.
- You have your credit card in hand and the person at the automobile repair check out says, “When did you drop off that car? I can’t seem to locate your vehicle?”
You get the idea. Search is broken for much textual content. Search is downright crappy for rich media. Try to locate a specific video on Google with only a date and the name of the person in the video. Try Nicole Scherzinger the finals of Dancing with the Stars. Doesn’t work too well does it?
We know the unfindable is costly. Data, please. Not anecdotes.
Stephen E Arnold, June 8, 2010
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That is a gem of a subject heading, thanks for cracking me up.
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