Information Seeking in Organisations: A Comparative Survey of Intranet Usage

Journal article, 2010

Trying to understand how laymen search for information, we have studied ordinary employees’ use of their intranets for work-related information seeking. Based on 267 responses to our web-based survey we have examined the use of various information sources in three different organisations, with a particular focus on the intranets. We have found that employees prefer to use menus to navigate to information and that a poor structure thus results in difficulties finding the right information. We have also found that gender appears to have an effect on people’s preferences for choosing one information source over another. This is a novel finding that organisations with an uneven gender distribution should consider when investing in IT support for information seeking.