Glean.com Pushback

  • 3 August 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 150 views
K Vermilyea
Userlevel 2

Hey all! Has anyone used Glean (glean.com) as their KMS or looked at it as part of a KMS evaluation? I have a CTO who is jazzed by it but I just see it as making the chaos more searchable, not solving the problem of wrangling the disparate docs into a centralized location.

 

Obviously, I ❤️ Guru and I’d like to shut down this convo. Welcome your thoughts!

3 replies

Joe Duffy
Rank
Userlevel 3

Hi @K Vermilyea! 👋

Here are a few reasons why we here at Guru see Enterprise Search tools as just a partial solution to the problem of information overload, which is what happens when there is an excess of and/or inability to find information you need to do your job:

  • Enterprise search does not solve existing content issues around duplicate information, out of date information, or information for the right audiences.
  • Because enterprise search results can return so many different kinds of content, they may actually contribute to the problem of information overload.
  • Search results often return long-form content or link to lengthy spreadsheets, so people have to search within a document once they've surfaced the right one (if they've surfaced the right one)
  • Enterprise search can fail because it provides a band aid on top of underlying issues with the information that's being searched
    • Think about the "garbage in, garbage out" principle --> if people are using a search tool and just keep digging up crummy information, problems will persist
    • Information is easier to find, but the underlying quality of the information remains poor
  • Enterprise search tools require a great deal of alignment with logins and data access to the underlying information sources. People may not have all of the logons they need, so search isn't finding assets in these data stores and information remains buried.
  • Very few enterprise search tools have a concept of delivering proactive knowledge to people in the course of their jobs. Guru's Knowledge Triggers and Announcements are a big advantage!

Hope this helps!

Joe

K Vermilyea
Userlevel 2

@Joe Duffy thanks for bringing the 🔥! My initial reaction when it was brought up was “That Slack and Google Workspace integration gives me hives,” but this sounds more professional and can lean on this in a meeting next week.

 

I ended up sharing with them to kick things off:

As far as glean.com goes, it's snazzy, for sure, and while it makes searching for information in disparate resources easier, solving a short term problem, it doesn't solve for our long term need to:
  1. Establish an overarching information architecture (categorization, taxonomy, etc.) to evolve as we do.
  2. Standardize departmental documentation creation and maintenance schedules for the information that needs to be known.
Additionally, I've floated this in my KM community and several folks have pointed out that certain softwares that sync to Glean don't offer gating for content that should only be visible by certain departments or employment types ("Regular" vs. "BPOs"  OR Business Unit), which Guru supports today. Its reporting also fails to offer depth that other KMS systems, like Guru and Confluence, provide.

 

 

Matt Garren
Rank
Userlevel 2

@Taylor M Paschal would love to hear your honest thoughts here!

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