Building Knowledge Strategies with Search Data

This paper outlines a toolkit to be used by a knowledge manager or corporate librarian charged with a knowledge management initiative. The toolkit is built of four strategies for connecting a corporate community with existing and new information resources that use a single dataset, the community’s intranet search query logs, as the foundation. In order, the strategies allow a knowledge manager to improve intranet search engine performance, design a more relevant and efficient information architecture for an existing intranet, create new content that directly fills identified knowledge gaps, and inform the curriculum of an existing corporate university program. The visualizations used to perform the analysis in this paper are built using Tableau and Gephi. Assumptions are made that the reader has a small degree of familiarity with these tools (or BI tools similar in design) in order to maintain efficiency of prose in the methodologies. Another major tool used is Knowledge Architecture’s Synthesis platform, particularly the Synthesis Search Optimization dashboard, which at the time of publication, is still in a beta release. Knowledge management takes many forms and this paper does not dive deeply into the theory on why these tools are effective. Assumptions are made that they are applicable to existing KM initiatives or are adaptable to the needs of the reader.