Enlist iWorkers In The Fight To Improve Information Access

Information workers (iWorkers) trust the information and data they find inside their companies almost twice as much as the information and data they find on the Internet, according to Forrester's Workforce Technographics® US Benchmark Survey, Q2 2009. Yet they search the Web and their own desktop far more frequently than their corporate intranet. Why? They can more easily find Web-based and personally stored information, and it may be more relevant to the task at hand. Employees do turn to the intranet for general errands like downloading benefits information. But just 22% of information workers who use an intranet in their job use the team-only content stored there. To meet iWorkers' complex information needs, information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals must do more than optimize intranet search; they should frame enterprise search projects using a worker-centered (not repository-centered) approach.