Hack:
Open-access Information Warehouse

By IESE MBA Team 2

December 1, 2010 at 2:06pm

Moonshots

Redefine the work of leadership

Summary

Develop a data warehouse which makes all documents company-wide, except payroll and some sensitive client data, available to all employees. All documents would be indexed and searchable to foster ease of access across the company.

Problem

In many organizations, access to information is closed between groups and different hierarchical levels within the company. Initially, when working on a project, it may not be clear if someone has done similar work. If it is known that similar work has been done, it may be unclear who completed the work. If it is known who did the work, contacting the employee may be difficult. If the employee can be contacted, it may be difficult to coordinate a time to meet to discuss the prior efforts. This broken flow of information can create long lag times, duplicative efforts, and suboptimal outcome.

Solution

Change in policy and technological infrastructure to make all employees’ work available to all other employees

All documents except payroll data and sensitive client information would be included in the system

The system would be centralized, indexed, and searchable via the company’s intranet

The author of each document would be listed, so that any follow-up questions could be directed to the author

Data would be stored in servers within the company, using existing technological resources if possible

The system would suggest potential tags to the document author for each document to increase searchability. Tags would cover the following:

§ Document key words/subject matter

§ Purpose/format of document (raw data, final presentation, primary research, etc.)

§ Stage of document (work in progress, final stage)

2. Ranking system

Page view algorithm – Calculates the number of times a document has been accessed

Feedback mechanism – Rating by peers on each document’s usefulness, quality, and accuracy

Search results would be dynamic, with the most relevant and helpful documents gaining higher placement in the results page

Performance reviews would add an additional component to incentivize knowledge exchange; authors of the best reviewed (per frequency and quality measures) documents would be rewarded

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