When McKinsey wrote a report in July 2012 entitled The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies, they understood that raising the productivity of knowledge workers is the most powerful application of social technologies.?

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They noted in their report: ¡°The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. But when companies use social media internally, messages become content; a searchable record of knowledge can reduce, by as much as 35 percent, the time employees spend searching for company information.¡±

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However, it turned out that employees do NOT need another Facebook, and that accessing information and files is still a time-consuming task.

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Why?

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There are many answers to that question, but the most frequent one is ¡°Too many irrelevant results.¡±.

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How do we quickly refine those results?

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Let us give you an example. Say you work in the water industry. Your division had a meeting last week about the new desalination processes and their costs. There is a document outlining those findings and you need to locate it to create budget proposals for the next year.

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If you search by keyword, by merely typing ¡°desalination¡± you¡¯ll get plenty of results. But by simply filtering those results to exclude everything but documents, as we did in our infographic, you¡¯ll locate your document quicker.

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If you have an excellent taxonomy in place, (if you don¡¯t, read this article on simple expertise taxonomies) it will be even easier for you to filter the results further and pinpoint that document in no time.?

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Yep, it¡¯s that simple.?