Scott Schnaars commented to a blog the other day that one of his customers once queried, ‘Why can I find my best friend from second grade, but I can’t find an expert on international tax law in my company?’

Isn’t that the truth?

Scott was replying to Michael Idinopulos’ blog post, All Respect to the Company Directory, in which he talks about the necessity to create a central repository to replace the old mimeographed directories of yore. As he says:

What’s… interesting is that when true company-wide directories do exist, they’re a killer app. When I was at McKinsey, for example, over 75% of our intranet searches were directory searches. I’d be surprised if the number were much different at other companies.

In the last decade the joke around a lot of companies, when someone was looking for an answer, was to reply, “It’s on the web!” At which time everyone would giggle, knowing full well how hard it is to find that one bit of trivia in a corporate sea of data.

Nowadays the resource you’re looking for is much more likely to be a human resource and, given that, it might be more appropriate to say, “She’s on the web!” Having a functional company directory is a big step toward helping people locate that resource.

Roger Farnsworth