Bert Hooyman — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 13:29:19 GMT

I think the difficulty with this approach is that the quality is dependent in part on users in a certain state of frustration (possibly not their most collaborative moment). Also, it appears that this solution is most effective when input is collected from as many apps as possible – a costly operation at best. Another problem I see is when there are name clashes. The reason Tim Campbell was added as Tim C in the first place is probably because the company already employed a Tim Campbell elsewhere. Search from “Tim Campbell” in that case leads to a success in terms of “found” but it is a false hit. This complicates the overall design significantly.

How about considering participation from the one person who is best placed to be aware of the problem of findability: Tim C himself? Tim would probably know that people have trouble locating him. Let Tim populate the list of aliases so that others can use it to their advantage. False hits still are a problem, of course.

The idea of adding more details such as business area, phone number mail ID etc are all very valid – SAP does this all the time with their concept of matchcodes. Take a look at http://web.mit.edu/hr/compensation/quickcards/ASR-matchco… to see how MIT has implemented people search using SAP.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Bert Hooyman