As information pile up in an organization, it becomes hard to manage and use. The available information that ideally should be taken into consideration before a decision is made may overwhelm the decision maker, who is overloaded with too much information to cope with. Due to time constraints, lack of oversight and ineffective access to information, the information worker is unaware of, or more or less forced to filter out and ignore some of the information available.
Relying on static structures to find relevant information when it is needed proves to be very hard in practice since data by itself can be ambiguous and not easy to categorize. A taxonomy used to categorize content might not match the current users understanding or knowledge. In addition, users categorize content dependent on their context and therefore it can be hard and time consuming to find information categorized and stored by another person if the context is different. The information might be stored in various sources such as local computer, file shares, cloud services, content repositories, in a database or perhaps only be available through a particular legacy system. Duplicates of the same or similar information in various stores and structures also add to the problem of where to look for correct and relevant information.
The time and effort needed by an information worker to find, consume and filter out relevant information from the available data very quickly becomes a non-affordable challenge, which in turn result in decisions that are not based on the actual information available and deliveries with lesser quality than desirable.
Instead of relying on the user to navigate to the right places in a static structure to look for and hopefully find relevant information, the idea behind Exselo Desktop is to let the user be the orchestrator to bring the relevant information to him/herself as quickly and effectively as possible.
An information index combined with search business logic makes it possible for the user to specify keywords that return relevant results found by looking across all information sources (the static structures). Subsequently, the user can explore the indexed data by modifying the initial query, expand or drill down the initial search result based on available metadata to find the sought for information or get more insights on the information available such as when it was created, authors, project/organizational context and where it is physically located.
The available but hard to get information represent an opportunity! Instead of fighting the information volume organizations should ask themselves: "What is our strategy?" to exploit the valuable information available. Done the right way, Exselo's technology will increase both the speed and quality of work, but it can also open up for new services and business models. We would love to help you explore these opportunities!
Learn more about Exselo Desktop, and how it can help you manage your data volumes.