Vistors to Amazon.com will be familiar with the relevant link suggestions provided when you search for an item. For example, if I search for Malcom Gladwell's Book, Outliers, I will also be provided with suggestions for other books I may be interested in (see image below). Intranets built using SharePoint can also provide this functionality - and this has enormous benefits.
This article describes how to do this and the benefits that can be obtained from using this approach.
Why is the Amazon approach critical to intranets?
Research from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge has shown the finding information on the intranet is the quality that is most important to end users and is also the quality that needs the most improvement.
A recent white paper released by Stephan Schillerwein also highlights the cost and difficulty of employees struggling to find information. For instance, did you know that:
- Employees search for information for 0.5 to 2 hours per day – that’s up to about a ¼ of the full work time. This is nearly 3 months per year per employee.
- The U.S. economy loses $900b to $1.5t per year due to information overload and information related time waste - this is approximately $4,000 a year for every man, woman and child
- Information isn‘t reaching decision makers on time, therefore 63% make business critical decisions five times or more a week without having the right information.
Obviously something needs to be done to address this issue. Part of the solution lies with SharePoint's most useful feature - the Lookup column type.
What is the Lookup column type?
The Lookup column type enables you to easily create and maintain relationships between two or more SharePoint lists. For example, you may have one list called Forms, another list called Department and third list called Roles. By using the column type function, you can identify:
- Which forms are relevant to which roles
- Which department owns which forms
- Which roles belong to which departments
So how does this help us?
The importance of this function is that it allows you to provide a meaningful and "linkable" context around related content types - something that is sadly lacking in many of today's intranets.
How many of today's intranets simply display a list of forms, websites or tools with little or no context around these lists? Too many from my personal experience!
For instance, on many intranets an end user may be confronted with a bland list of forms such as:
- IT User Form
- Capability Assessment Form
- Key Transmittal Form
- 360 Degree Feedback Form
- Resource Request Form
- Project Code Request Form
- New Staff Request Form
- Obsolete Equipment Form
The end user may well ask questions like; Are these forms relevant to me? What are they used for? Who owns them? When should I use them? Is there anything else I need for these forms to work?
By adding Lookup Column Types linking the forms to Role and Department, it's easy to provide a more meaningful and useful list such as the following.
Role: Project Manager
- Resource Request Form
- Project Code Request Form
- New Staff Request Form
- Capability Assessment Form
Role: Asset Manager
- Obsolete Equipment Form
- IT User Form
- Key Transmittal Form
Role: All Staff
- 360 Degree Feedback Form
End users can now see which forms are relevant to them. You could also provide a view of which departments own which forms so end users could potentially search by department if they wished (eg. show me all the HR forms).
But even more importantly...
In addition to providing a more meaningful view, end users can now click the link to the Related Column Type (eg. Role) and this will show them a more detailed description of the role.
For instance, you could see what Department the role belongs to, what other documents, applications, tools, etc are relevant to that role. You could then click on Department and and see what other roles exist within that department... the possible relationships are endless....
Like the cement that holds the bricks in a house together, the Lookup Column Function is like the cement that holds your different content types together. Without this cement, your house is really just a pile of bricks.
The big advantage of providing context using the Lookup Property is that it makes it easier for your end users to find information they may not have known existed. Unlike search which simply finds items that match your criteria.
The article, Browse versus Search, summaries this concept nicely. It says '"a user relies on search to find specific information he or she already knows or suspects to exist. Rarely does a user search for something he or she doesn’t even know to search for."
How the Lookup Property can help make your intranet like Amazon
This functionality is not disimiliar to many websites that provide contextual links. For example, when you search for a book on amazon.com, you will also be provided with links to other books or merchandise related to your orginal query. You may not have even known these books or merchandise existed.
The Internet Movie Database works in a similar way - you can locate a movie and he IMDB will list other movies that you may like.
Tracking your relationships
When using the Lookup Column Type function, it's important to keep track of the relationships you create. Otherwise it's easy for relationships and content types to be duplicated and managing these relationships becomes a nightmare. The following diagram shows a possible mapping of content types for an intranet using SharePoint.
Summary
The ability to add context to related content types is a function that is not used often enough. Particularly with intranets.
It is one of the reasons organisations often complain that information is 'siloed' and difficult to find. If there was a context provided for each content type, this would give greater meaning, findability and coherence to seemingly disjointed and unrelated 'bricks' of information.
This approach would go a long way to addressing end user problems with finding information. It would help people 'know what they don't know'.
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