The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear.

Vannevar Bush, As We May Think (The Atlantic, 1945)

Solve human problems with humans

I’m going to preface this by saying that this is not exactly a novel or ground-breaking idea. Corporate libraries and the experts in charge of them have existed for well over 100 years. Corporate librarians were integral to the development of information science as a discipline, meaning a lot of us in UX research (myself included) can draw a direct line from corporate librarianship to our own work.

And a lot of our work does, or at least should, include a huge amount of overlap with library science. Relatively early on in my days in UX, I was trying to identify the common theme between the three different careers I’ve pursued: library work, event planning, and UX research. After banging my head against it for a good, long time, I finally realized that the thing that brings them together is the organization of information in service of human needs (if this sounds like a stretch for event planning, think about the last time you tried to plan a group get-together). The thing that stands out about research in this list is that researchers are also responsible for generating the information they need to organize.

However, in most organizations, researchers aren’t exactly incentivized to spend time on organizing the information they generate. With an ever-growing backlog of new projects to work through, setting aside the time to thoughtfully situate our work in the larger context of the company’s existing knowledge is almost never included in our process. Even for those researchers who are inclined towards library science, the company’s existing knowledge is likely not in a state that’s conducive to it.

Before we go any further, let me describe what I think the ideal state of information is at any given organization. Key to this is the idea of situating work in the larger context of the company’s existing knowledge. For me, this goes beyond simply organizing research reports in a repository or shared location. To truly get the most of out of a research team, every new set of insights that’s created should also help the company understand how it fits into the existing body of knowledge on the topic, continually refining, evolving, and honing the company’s point of view and perspective on it.

What’s more, this body of knowledge should include all the insights that are available, not simply those generated by the research team. Customer success, data science, product analytics, support, sales, market research, and countless other teams have a wealth of knowledge about different aspects of users and their needs and behaviors. In the Borgesian knowledge repository of my dreams, all of these insights are woven together into synthesized, coherent points of view on the things that matter most to the company¹.

There’s a huge amount of upside in this approach for companies (other than the inherent satisfaction of something being thoroughly cataloged and well-organized). When done well, it reduces duplication of efforts by ensuring everyone can easily look up what’s already been done, makes the company’s knowledge accessible, usable, and durable, and brings together all the knowledge on a given topic so everyone is working with the same information. It extends the lifespan of research findings and other insights work by adding time as a dimension. Companies can look back and see how users’ needs and behaviors have changed over time. They can make thoughtful decisions about the degree to which a given report is still relevant because they can see when it was created and what was learned since.

So: what’s the catch? The catch is that this problem can’t be solved with technology. This problem can only be solved by people. Research repositories and knowledge bases are only as good as the effort that goes into organizing them. They can’t provide the kind of ongoing contextual awareness and evolution that elevates a collection of information to a knowledge repository. For that, you need human intervention, and you need it in an ongoing way. You need someone who will not simply catalog the insights created by teams around the company, but who can synthesize them into a coherent point of view and then share that point of view with the entire company.

Companies need to invest in not just organizing the information they have, but finding and elucidating the connections between those pieces of information, and then making that findable, usable, and durable. Doing this means you can create a world where every single person in the company is able to learn about and develop intuition for your users and their needs, and use that to do their best work. It means you have all the existing information from your years of operation right at your fingertips, ready to use. It means you don’t just have information, you have insight.

[1] My fellow information scientists and knowledge nerds of all types will recognize this almost immediately as near-identical to the memex, from Vannevar Bush’s truly transcendent 1945 essay, As We May Think. I have a whole other thing on the relationship between the imagined libraries of Borges and the idea of the memex, but this is not the post for it.