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Don’t Kill Off Delve

It’s Friday morning at 11:29 am and I’m still in bed rubbing the sleep in my eyes and brushing off the crumbs of the toast I had this morning.

Since 7:30 am, I’ve been doing Lynda.com courses on tips and tricks of Windows 10, On Demand File Synching and other things that take my fancy in an effort to rapidly skill up on my knowledge and use of Windows and Microsoft products.

Ever since I started a part-time role at Adopt & Embrace it’s been a mad race to learn all things Microsoft so that I’m comfortable advising clients.  It means that I need to understand the full value, use, benefits and potential of Microsoft products when it comes to work and learning.  (And what I’m learning is that Microsoft and it’s partnerships with LinkedIn as well as it’s AI capabilities – well, I may as well hang up up hat and retire. It’s products basically mean that you can do pretty much everything you can think of within its ecosphere except make coffee – although you can make a bot order you one)…(there’s a story there too but I digress)…

After playing in the Google and Apple ecosphere as well as using third-party applications in my own freelance work, going back to Microsoft (I last touched it when it was Windows XP) means I have a whole lot of catching up to do.  Everything about it has changed so I decided to access Lynda and start using my free time to just skill up – total immersion into Microsoft.

As I was undertaking these courses, I decided to look at what the Delve course had to say for itself.  It’s been around for a few years and I heard that it’s days are numbered. Apparently, there were whispers that came out of MS Ignite, one of the major Microsoft conferences in the USA.

What’s So Special About Delve?

That’s a good question especially as it’s been around for a few years already but it seems organisations weren’t taken by it.  In my own experience, my peers never knew what it was, why it existed, what was its point.  I do remember people freaking out that they had the documents they were working for all to see.  There was always some exclaim of surprise to see the latest document they were working on in public view with a split second later when you could hear them thinking, “oh crap. I wonder if people can see that I was updating my CV (or insert personal document here).”

Delve was relatively unknown to many people.

However, I was a keen user of it every time I was contracted to work in an organisation.  When I was set up with an account, it was the main application I used to find resources and seek out experts in the organisation I was in – also see what people were working on.

One of the things that I amazed me were that many didn’t even bother filling out their profiles so, in effect, their skills, talents, projects and expertise was pretty much invisible across their own organisation.

I think there was a missed opportunity for many companies to understand what skills and capabilities their people had in the organisation just by asking people to ensure they had a fully filled out profile.  Also, an opportunity for people to find, curate and connect with experts around their own company – and while we’re at it, at a glance see where the duplications were by way of what’s being worked on across the company.

The other loss is that it was a platform that EVERYONE WAS ALREADY ON AND HAD ACCESS TO!  That is, they ALL had a profile (albeit mostly an empty one).

There was no need to buy in any other platform or redirect people to other sites.  Sure, you have your HRMIS site where you’ve got everyone’s details on there linked to their pay and leave – but where’s their work visible? On Delve!

Anyway, I used to shake my head and think maybe people just aren’t seeing what I’m seeing. Maybe I’m the crazy one?  Can’t anyone else see that one quick way of finding the skills and capabilities you need for your future workplace is just GETTING PEOPLE TO FILL OUT THEIR DELVE PROFILE AS A QUICK WIN because it’s SEARCHABLE.

Delve was a no-brainer for me but obviously, I wasn’t loud enough.

Delve Needs to Evolve Not to be Killed Off

I know Delve has an uncertain future but it’s one thing I’ve enjoyed about Microsoft. Why? It’s an excellent people search (if people fill out their details) and a curation tool (for documents that are available to be seen) and where you can create boards around favourite internal content.  Now there’s talk that it’ll be taken over by more effective search in Cortana.

And I’ve done the Cortana training and let me add, that it’s actually pretty good – freakingly good –  when you can rattle off requests to Cortana to get her to find you all sorts of stuff across the web, however, it’s making me think of the demise of “slow curation” in preference for “fast searches” and the impact of what we actually DO with that information once we find it.

It got me thinking and tweeting this morning that we still need an effective workplace content curation tool, a place where we can curate each other’s work.  Delve has Boards where you can Favourite content but there’s no place to add any context.

That got me thinking about how Delve could evolve into a business curation tool like the excellent site ScoopIt.  ScoopIt is a content curation platform that allows you to select, edit and editorialise and then distribute content.

It’s the middle bit – the editorialising – which I’m interested in because that’s the sense-making part. That requires some thinking, organising, cataloging, tagging, contextualising, reflecting and adding your own value to that content – and this is not what people are doing in organisations nowadays.  Everyone wants the quick search – very little thinking is involved in once you have what you’re looking for, how does it help you? Help others? How can you add your own value by customising, changing it and making something new from it?

….yeah, we’re not doing that….

The way I was thinking about it was that I could “delve” into the work of another colleague, provide some meaning and context around it, save it to particular boards which I can refer to or share to others. I can create a suite of boards around particular work interests or project that curates documents from colleagues around my organisation so that I can see the similarities and the differences.

I hope that Delve doesn’t go by way of Sway (which I thought was again, another excellent tool) but I’m beginning to think that sometimes, people don’t see their value until too late.

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This blog post by Helen Blunden was written in Melbourne, Australia and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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