Digital Transformation Today

Delve: Is It Creepy or Is It Useful?

is-delve-creepy.jpgIf you’ve been using Office 365 lately, you’ve probably noticed the presence of an application called Delve. But what is Delve, and how does it tie into Microsoft’s vision for the enterprise software platform? Simply put, Delve is a relatively new Office 365 tool intended to help users and businesses get creative insights into their data and information using both Office 365 and external content.

But is Delve truly useful, or is it just another technological encroachment by big businesses on people’s privacy? In order to answer that, we’ll first need to look at how you should be using Delve, as well as how it works.

Three Ways to Use Delve

One of the biggest challenges for information workers is the struggle to relocate documents that you’ve worked on before. Even if a file is well-organized within the SharePoint workspace, it can still be hard to find because of the sheer amount of data that many organizations produce. Delve is intended to help with this task by improving your searches and showing you content that you’ve previously accessed.

Delve was also conceived by Microsoft as a hub to discover new potentially useful information by displaying files such as documents, conversations and emails. It can help generate ideas that you might have once made by chatting with a colleague or huddling around the water cooler.

Finally, Delve allows you to find new connections using Office Graph, a mathematical algorithm which relies on graph technology invented by Facebook about 10 years ago. You can use Office Graph to find coworkers that you may not know about and see what they’re working on, potentially opening doors for collaboration.

How Delve Works

Delve relies on Office Graph to provide useful information to its users. The Office Graph can be thought of as a very deep, intricate map of the relationship between your intranet users and the content related to them. What’s more, the graph is enhanced over time as the system accumulates more data around user behavior and connections – a technique known as machine learning.

This ability to quickly find previously unknown information can seem a little bit like magic. Instead of having to make calls and send emails in hope of receiving a response, you can go into Delve, type in a few queries, and discover a wealth of interesting people and content.

Where Delve can get “creepy,” however – and where it gets some pushback – is the fact that the system knows everything, as it observes and maps user behavior and information behind the scenes. Your employees might find it intrusive or bothersome to have a system telling them what they worked on – and have others able to view it too. Depending on the organization, Delve could potentially be used to micromanage people or even track them like Big Brother.

You Can Protect Yourself

There are remedies to Delve’s “creepiness,” however. You can opt out from Office Graph by telling it not to track your activity, essentially removing yourself from this giant user-content map.

Delve respects the privacy of its users. The technology can only help you can find things that you already have access to. In addition, if you see something private of yours in the results of your Delve search, that doesn’t mean that other users have access to it.

You can also empower your employees with training and governance around the ability to opt out of Delve and to understand the privacy aspects of the application. Remember that if you want a file of yours to be private, you shouldn’t put it in a shared space, an idea that’s certainly not exclusive to Delve.

Final Thought

In the end, I find there is more usefulness to Delve than creepiness. People have gotten used to sharing thoughts and pictures on Facebook, so Delve is the natural extension of that idea in the workplace. However, Delve is not a social network, and any content that users share should be for the benefit of others.

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