Purpose - The aim is to determine, in a business context, if tagging is a more effective method of discovering relevant information when compared to traditional hierarchical filing systems.Design/methodology/approach - A five-step interpretive hybrid approach of using both a focus group, questionnaires and SWOT analysis was used to test the proof of concept of tagging files compared to a traditional hierarchical filing system. The approach taken was chosen because of the difficulties and tradeoffs that had to be made between the number of champions and people available to take part in the research; the time that they could allow; and because transcription or recording of the participants was not permitted. The participants were encouraged to use the questionnaires and the SWOT analysis to record their thoughts anonymously whilst the focus groups allowed elaboration and discussion to help understand the true feelings and thoughts of the group collaboratively.Findings - Traditional hierarchical filing systems can lead to the retrieval of irrelevant information, or to none at all, even though the information exists. The study shows that tagging could provide a cost-effective solution by providing a better structured filing system that can help reduce duplication and the retrieval of irrelevant information.Research limitations/implications - One limitation of the study was the limited number of participants from just one organisation. Thus, generalisation of the results of this study to the wider population must be done with great care.Practical implications - Organisations should evaluate the functionality of their chosen operating system and information store software in light of the potential benefits offered by tagging, and costly limitations of traditional file stores.Originality/value - The paper contributes to the information retrieval and information overload literature by studying the effect tagging files has on an organisation. It provides an insight to the future of filing systems for management and triggers future empirical work into reducing information overload in the workplace.

The internet has recently become a key part of the working lives of many people. Since its conception and invention it has grown rapidly, expanding exponentially into what we see today. With this expansion has come the challenge of finding information that is relevant within the mass of content available. Information has become more and more difficult to find (Chen, Dumais 2000) and once users do find information it may be difficult to assess the relevance of this information within an acceptable time period. For years now the mainstream search engines such as Google, MSN Search and Yahoo Search have been introducing new technology and improving the search process. However, although they have improved these systems the method of presentation has barely changed since the conception of these engines in the mid 1990's. Results are presented as a list of articles with a small summary linking to the document. This paper looks at a novel approach which builds on the idea of Tag Clouds to produce a small visualisation of the search results, called a Concept Cloud. It uses the same presentation technique as the Tag Clouds and summarises a single document. This paper outlines a tool developed by one of the authors, a doctoral student, which aims to summarise a document and show the key terms of the document using a novel approach adapted from existing web 2.0 technologies. The tool was conceived and created to aid with searching a web based decision capture and support system made within a multi-national pharmaceutical organisation. The key objective was to see if we could enable users to find documents more easily and quickly. Although the decision support system employs a novel method for obtaining and searching information, using both ontologies and dictionaries to aid information retrieval, the information is currently displayed as a list that is no different to conventional search engines.