29
Feb 2012
How Good is Your People Finder?
Here is a quick checklist that you can use to rate your phone book ‘maturity’.
Count your points for the following:
1) 1 Point if all your employees are in one phone book
2 bonus points if contractors are too
2 bonus points if you have supplier contacts
2) 1 Point if all employee data comes from a master source
2 bonus points if you have a process to check accuracy (e.g. when people have left)
3) 1 Point if you include photos
4) 1 point if you include manager information
2 bonus points for a dynamic organisation chart (i.e. a graphic visualisation that changes as soon as you change your manager)
5) 2 points if you include skills and expertise
1 bonus point if 50% of your people have filled it in
2 bonus points if more than 75% have filled it in
6) 1 point if you can refine search by department or location
2 bonus points if you can search skills or expertise
7) 2 points if you have presence
8 ) 1 point if you link to availability calendar information
9) 2 points if employees can access phone numbers from a mobile phone
10) 1 point if you can start a phone call by clicking on a name or number in the phone book (unified communications)
If you add up your points the maximum possible is 25. I use this in when I run Mastering Intranet Management courses. Anything over 10 is pretty good. Over 17 puts you in the elite zone.
Please add a comment below to share how you scored.
Sharon
Ours scores a big fat zero. Fortunately, it’s on the project list for this year – at last!
Martin White
A great survey, but just two thoughts.
1. You should only be able to claim 1 point for a photo if the photo is compliant with data privacy legislation.
2. When you talk about finding expertise through search are you referring to searching user-generated expertise profiles and/or the use of entity extraction application?
Sam Marshall
Well said Martin. Definitely there’s a legal element to this – a whole extra checklist probably!
For finding expertise, this is your specialist subject – can you say more about what you have in mind with entity extraction?
Sam Marshall
Scores so far (also via Twitter)
20.5 <- nudged up from 18 yesterday due to an overnight install, talk about responding to the challenge! 19 or 20 (awaiting evidence!) 19 16 15 6 0
Sharon
Lordy – I knew ours was bad, but looking at all these scores we really are worst in class by a long way.
Perhaps that will help me make the business case for change.
Anni
COWI scores 20.5 points
Karen
How about points for a search enginge that takes into account maiden names and changed married names? I cannot remember how to find 1/2 the females that I contact only occasionally because my company assumes we know who uses a maiden name & who uses a married name.
Sam Marshall
Ah, good point. I’m surprised this doesn’t come up as an issue more often actually. I think good address books should have an “Also known as” field for all such variants. It applies too to all the NicolaNikkiNicky type name variants or places where very long names are often abbreviated to initials e.g. India.
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