What if your corporate intranet was actually useful?

..I mean helpful without a ton of work and time....

Weirdly, this is EXACTLY what I look like when I’m working. MidJourney just nailed it.

I like the article below for two reasons - the 2nd one is what the body of the issue is about but the 1st one is something I wanted to mention. I’ve touched on this before but when I see an article like this one, my thinking isn’t about the implications in the next 3 months but rather if this is a signal for a trend or a product family that could grow and eventually have a large impact on our work. Just keep that in mind - that I’m not always talking about what could happen in the next quarter but 3 quarters forward let’s say. I’ll also say that I do that not because the tech moves at that speed but because we do - our principles of OD and management and especially accounting, lag tech development and I want to spin that development horizon out far enough so that we have some room to start making those organizational challenges. Now, read on.

This article (Arc Search combines browser, search engine, and AI into something new and different) makes me think about my time at Amazon. Let me be crystal clear, I learned a ton while there, graduate school level of learning to be sure, in a very Amazonian way though, I also noticed some places that could use some attention. One of those was how knowledge management was treated in many of the orgs I was in.

"Look on the wiki" - was the standard response when looking for something not immediately at someone's fingertips. The wiki was...less that super helpful. Let me go back a little further and mention that I used to work at a company named Social Text. Ross Mayfield and Social Text were early pioneers/movers in the enterprise social network space. Back then (when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the internet was dial-up), the product could be thought of as a really robust wiki platform. I saw it used and help clients build solutions on it, to serve as everything from a shared spreadsheet (shout out to Dan Bricklin and VisiCalc) to a workflow organizer for government press releases. The main issue there was the same issue that plagued Amazon’s wiki - let’s call it governance.

Governance might be too formal a word, maybe gardening is more fitting. The Amazon wiki, and many of Social Text’s clients’ wikis, were fertile ground in which everything grew. Grew so much that in really short order, it became hard to find anything. Search wasn’t super helpful - bringing you back links to pages that lacked any metadata and maybe just had a title so you had to keep clicking and looking at pages individually to see if it had found what you were after. This was especially frustrating because there are so many smart people at Amazon and you just knew that the answer you needed was out there somewhere, you just usually couldn't find it. This had the follow-on effect of not just wasting time in the first place when an ineffective search happened, but also when it couldn't be found, the searcher would often have to build or create the solution on their own so more time wasted. This is the place in my brain that lights up when I see an article like the one above.

This part grabbed me "A few minutes ago, I opened the new Arc Search app and typed, “What happened in the Chiefs game?” That game, the AFC Championship, had just wrapped up. Normally, I’d Google it, click on a few links, and read about the game that way. But in Arc Search, I typed the query and tapped the “Browse for me” button instead. Arc Search, the new iOS app from The Browser Company, which has been working on a browser called Arc for the last few years, went to work. It scoured the web — reading six pages, it told me, from Twitter to The Guardian to USA Today — and returned a bunch of information a few seconds later. I got the headline: Chiefs win. I got the final score, the key play, a “notable event” that also just said the Chiefs won, a note about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, a bunch of related links, and some more bullet points about the game. Basically, instead of returning a bunch of search queries about the Chiefs game, Arc Search built me a webpage about it."

Wow. Now imagine that event happening every time you had to find something on the corporate intranet - and the more systems something like Arc has access to, the richer results it can build. MSFT with Teams, Viva, M365 and OpenAI, probably has one of the most robust tech stacks out there for building really rich results like this - it could include people who are working on the problem you're researching, when they'll be in the office, which office, would you like to schedule a call with them, and on and on.

So when we talk about the promise of AI in the enterprise, what I see are these concrete improvements that have to potential to unlock all kinds of resources. The challenge then is what will we do with those freed resources? Value vs activity….