Individual Freedom and Enlightened Self-Interest: Prerequisites for knowledge worker productivity?

Numerous industry studies document the serious productivity cost incurred by knowledge-reliant organisations when employees are unable to locate the information resources they need to do their jobs, or take too long to do so. The traditional approach to avoiding this problem has been to impose an organisation-specific taxonomy and to tag documents with subject metadata describing and classifying it. A study of a university with a strong organisational commitment to metadata, explains why this approach fails and shows how little such metadata contributes to satisfying searches people actually conduct. If present in sufficient quantity, metadata applied freely by “the masses” can contribute strongly to resource discovery. Hyperlinks and their anchortext provide popularity/importance signals as well as weighted topical metadata reflecting a useful diversity of perspectives and language among web/intranet authors. Queries are another useful source of weighted metadata and can be associated with resources through the clicking and other behaviour of searchers. Results from a number of organisations will be presented illustrating the search gains achievable from these sources. Employees and stakeholders can easily be provided with the means to apply folksonomy metadata through tagging but a study of a public museum website shows that, in the absence of incentive and motivation, metadata volumes will be very small. Finally, timeliness of metadata is critical to usefulness. We have shown how microblog posts can be interpreted as metadata describing the web resources they link to and can be used to retrieve very recently created content. Since microblogging systems are now available for the enterprise, there is potential for improvement in enterprise resource discovery from this means too, provided that employees and stakeholders can be motivated to provide the data.