Comment by temac
4 years ago
> “Hey Kristy, where can I find the payroll schedule?” > “Twelve dot oh-three.”
Or, you know, don't encumber the brains of people with useless numbers, and use computers for what they are actually good are, at least better than people, e.g. use the search feature of your file browser for "payroll schedule".
(I'm the eponymous 'Johnny'.)
This is a real example from a past life, and really works when you're shouting across an office or talking down the phone.
The longer original, edited down for brevity, went something like:
"Hey Kristy, where can I find the payroll schedule?"
"Okay go to the Finance folder. No, the one in the G: drive. Yeah now go to Payroll ... oh sorry, it's Payroll 2020. Yeah no not the Payroll 2020 in the Payroll folder, the one at the root. Yeah. Now in there ... hang on let me have a look ... okay there's a 'Janice' folder and in there..." ... and so on, ad. absurdium.
Triggered. :)
In practice it looks like this: here's stuff matching "payroll schedule" - "payroll schedule 2018", "payroll schedule template", "payroll schedule for contractors", "payroll to reschedule July 2017", etc.
It's a common issue with intranets. There's lots of content, but not enough traffic to figure out what you may be interested in. And even if there was, you may not be after the "most popular" item.
Don't forget that the document you may be looking for may actually be called "payment schedule" instead of payroll schedule because someone wasn't good at following the implicit, unwritten naming convention.
That's cool if you know exactly what you're searching for. It gets less useful as the amount of information you have drops - you basically have to do multiple searches and hope one of the terms you're guessing will be a hit. Having categorised folders on the other hand means you can narrow it down and be sure that your search process is "exhaustive".
Search is not reliable or reproducible. People search for things in different ways, and the content of a file is separate from the location while both are important.
And search systems today are still terrible. Different interfaces, searching different locations and content, with different ranking and relevance and operators. Much faster to just direct someone where something is and let their brain figure out the rest, because we're actually very good at that.