When employees need to find information to do their work, some people prefer to browse, exploring folders and content libraries until they find the right information, while others start with search tools.
Due to the sheer volume of information that knowledge workers are creating every day, it’s almost impossible to find and reuse content without robust enterprise search capabilities.
The new Delve and Office Graph capabilities in Office 365 offer a great way to improve your company’s knowledge management by combining enterprise search with machine learning. Integrating these components in the cloud allows for a more relevant approach to knowledge management that’s based on actual user behavior.
When you look at the menu or suite bar in Office 365, one of the tiles is for Delve, which is essentially a search engine that’s constantly combing your entire Office 365 environment. When you launch Delve, it presents the most relevant information for you based on the kind of work you do and the people you tend to collaborate with on documents.
Let’s say that you typically collaborate on content for a number of different teams, and that work takes place on different SharePoint team sites in Office 365. As other team members review and edit those documents, Delve may bring them to your attention in case you want to look at the comments and changes.
Office Graph is the machine-learning and search engine that fuels Delve. As you use Office 365, it uses your activities to build relationships between people, processes and information in an ever-evolving network. Office Graph focuses on repetitive user behaviors and gradually learns to identify patterns of activity and interaction.
You could think of Delve as an appealing, constantly updated dashboard that displays information based on what’s going on in Office Graph.
This approach to knowledge management only works when you have a cost-effective way to store vast quantities of data, and that’s one reason the cloud is a game-changer. With Office 365, it’s relatively inexpensive to manage data in the cloud, which helps organizations to reduce overhead and unlock new capabilities. You’ll save money while gaining powerful tools to improve your knowledge management.
The challenge that many organizations face in gaining these benefits is that working in this way represents a significant shift for a large part of the workforce. To a lot of people, the cloud is still just a buzzword, and they’re not sure what it means to work in a cloud-computing environment. In order to be successful with Office 365, organizations need to pay extra attention to communicating, training and change management.
It’s also important to align your information management and your records management, perhaps by bringing IT and legal teams together to collaborate on strategy. This type of alignment should help you make your organization more productive and synergistic.
In the end, knowledge management is an ongoing process. As your organization changes — due to a new product, new management or new corporate strategy, for example — the type of search results people need will also change. Your IT and knowledge management professionals must be able to evolve with the technology and gain new skills with creating and managing taxonomies.
