I thought you might ask about that. My statement is based on a bit of both anecdotal experience and published information, though I might have difficulty digging up the publication. On the anecdotal side, I built an intranet for a large technology company. Our internal surveys and recorded statistics from the site revealed that the employee directory accounted for as much as 50% of the site usage, especially when we added features like a tree that showed reporting relationships. I have also taken time to poll other IT intranet owners, in an informal way, about their intranet usage patterns. The directory always comes out on top, though I will stress that my research is informal and by no means conclusive.
I believe the first hard data I saw about employee directory usage was from the KMWorld Intranets conference back in 2001. I don't have any of the publications from the conference, though, so I can't say for sure. Jaob Nielsen makes a reference to the employee directory importance in his Best Intranets of 2007 here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intranet_design.html " The *employee directory search* (the people finder) is a killer app on most intranets. Microsoft uses the over-hyped Internet concepts of social networking and *degrees of social distance* in a pragmatic manner to make its employee search even better, sorting results by degree of distance from the user. Often, it makes sense that users would want to find people closely related to them; such sorting can be very helpful in a big organization where many people may have similar names or the same job titles." He has been at the KMWorld conference, and his group might actually have the stats that you are asking about. He has another reference, more explicit this time, in this article about Employee Directory Search, here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030224.html "We know from our research that looking up colleagues in the employee directory is one of the key intranet killer apps in many companies. This action is performed so frequently that a shortcut seems in order." On 8/3/07, Adam Churvis wrote: > Robert Munn said: > > The employee directory is the top used function of every intranet. > > Robert, > > When you say "every intranet," is that from personal experience with many > of > them, or are you referring to a published statistic? > -- --------------- Robert Munn www.emergentpath.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| ColdFusion 8 - Build next generation apps today, with easy PDF and Ajax features - download now http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/coldfusion/cf8_beta_whatsnew_052907.pdf Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/message.cfm/messageid:239499 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.5
