Answers for the Corporate Intranet
Published by Sushi on Thursday, October 25, 2007 at 9:25 AM.
Working for a multi-national corporation bigger than many nation states, there are many times when I'll have questions for people in different time zone who I will never meet. Sometimes these are requests for specific information that needs to be addressed to one specific person, and I'll have to search the corporate website or ask around in the office for his or her contact info. However, most of the time, the questions can be answered by many people, typically in departments very disconnected from where I reside. This may be partly due to my job function, but I've seen it happen with other people in other departments and other companies. E-mails are great tools when you want to communicate with specific people, but they aren't very useful when you don't know who you need to ask.
This is where something similar to Yahoo Answers (or the now extinct Google Answers) would work greatly. If you don't know about those two services (and there are other similar services, I just can't remember them) , I highly suggest reading about them. In short, they are places where a community of users can post and answer questions. Different services have different incentive schemes to get people to answer questions; Yahoo works on a point system where you have to answer questions in order to ask them, Google worked on money. Simply, what's needed is a platform where people in the company can ask questions to a broad audience.
Of course the finer implementation details are what makes or breaks this system. How would you provide incentive for people to answer questions? You could make it a company policy for everyone to answer one question a day, or you could make it part of someone's performance. How do you make sure the right questions migrate to the right people? Yahoo and Google both use categories and subcategories. Corporate departments and organizational charts might be a good starting point for questions taxonomy. A powerful search function would also be imperative to prevent the same questions from being asked over and over. Furthermore, a powerful search function combined with an archive would create a new type of knowledge database for the company.
Last but not least, Answers could also be used to increase social interaction amongst employees and raise morale. Wouldn't it be nice to ask everyone's opinion on what the best restaurant around the office is? A new employee could ask where the best neighborhoods to live are (and then subsequent new employees could use that knowledge in the future).
It will take a lot of iterations and experimentations to get this right, but anything is better than what we have now, the blind search for someone that could potentially answer your question (and hoping that he or she is not on vacation).
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This is where something similar to Yahoo Answers (or the now extinct Google Answers) would work greatly. If you don't know about those two services (and there are other similar services, I just can't remember them) , I highly suggest reading about them. In short, they are places where a community of users can post and answer questions. Different services have different incentive schemes to get people to answer questions; Yahoo works on a point system where you have to answer questions in order to ask them, Google worked on money. Simply, what's needed is a platform where people in the company can ask questions to a broad audience.
Of course the finer implementation details are what makes or breaks this system. How would you provide incentive for people to answer questions? You could make it a company policy for everyone to answer one question a day, or you could make it part of someone's performance. How do you make sure the right questions migrate to the right people? Yahoo and Google both use categories and subcategories. Corporate departments and organizational charts might be a good starting point for questions taxonomy. A powerful search function would also be imperative to prevent the same questions from being asked over and over. Furthermore, a powerful search function combined with an archive would create a new type of knowledge database for the company.
Last but not least, Answers could also be used to increase social interaction amongst employees and raise morale. Wouldn't it be nice to ask everyone's opinion on what the best restaurant around the office is? A new employee could ask where the best neighborhoods to live are (and then subsequent new employees could use that knowledge in the future).
It will take a lot of iterations and experimentations to get this right, but anything is better than what we have now, the blind search for someone that could potentially answer your question (and hoping that he or she is not on vacation).
