How do people find the information they need? — SCANS

Originally published July 4, 2019

I received the following comment on my post, What Does Successful Knowledge Management Look Like?

From Dale Coparanis: “Everyone knows how to find the information they need, and it is readily available to them.” This is one of those areas where I believe KM folks miss the boat. To expect everyone to know where the information is implies a level of data sophistication that not everyone has or wants. This is especially true of decision makers who deal with many different types of decisions such as the owner, CEO, COO, directors, etc. A knowledge manager can have a profound impact on how an organization can more effectively make decisions by helping to tailor the knowledge that is needed by the decision makers and getting it to them in the way that is best for them. Brett Patron and I write about this in Can Knowledge Management Positively Enhance Decision Making?

It’s generally the case that knowledge managers are better at finding information than others in their organization, including senior executives. But knowledge managers can also enable people to more easily get the information they need in these five ways:

SCANS

1. Search
2. Curated content
3. Ask
4. Navigate
5. Subscribe

Knowing how to find information includes:

1. Having ready access to effective enterprise search
2. Receiving curated content when searching
3. Knowing whom to ask for help in finding information, e.g.,

• Community members
• Knowledge managers
• Knowledge assistants

4. Being able to easily navigate to it

5. Subscribing to automatically receive desired content

See also:

1. 7 Habits of Highly Effective Knowledge Managers
2. Knowledge Managers and KM Leaders
3. Expertise Locators and Ask the Expert
4. What are you supposed to do in a community?
5. KM User Assistance and Knowledge Help Desk
6. Search Engines and Enterprise Search
7. Improving enterprise search results: Why don’t you just tell me what you need?
8. User Interface, User Experience & Usability for Knowledge Management
9. Syndication, Aggregation, and Subscription Management Systems
10. Stop being so pushy; use the power of pull instead