Information seeking in organisations

Other conference contribution, 2005

We have compared three different organisations to see patterns of information seeking behaviour amongst ordinare members with a particular focus on intranet usage. Data was collected via online surveys where the URL was emailed to 601 members in the three organisations and 267 replies were received. Intranet are typically heterogeneous information environments but we still found three general conclusions. Firstly, the strong correlation between the perceived structure of the intranet and the perceived ease of finding information suggests that the time spent on information architecture is worthwhile. Secondly, different professional groups may use technology differently and we found teachers to be more able to find information on the intranet than other groups. Thirdly, the motive for choosing a particular information source appears to be gender-related.