Reckless Capture
My wife Alison occasionally asks me to remember stuff for her. Just yesterday, she said, while we were out “Remind me to ring the bank when we get home”.
I nodded amicably.
As a general rule, this probably isn’t the best way for her to retain a piece of information. I’m easily distracted by shiny things, I routinely forget stuff, and as much as I’d like to, I can’t assure her that I’m actually going to retain the information.
Worse still, I’m almost certainly going to give the same response to every request (an amicable nod) regardless of whether I’m actually going to remember it.
If you want information to be retained outside of your head, you should really write it down. Paper records of information are much more reliable than memory for recall. This notion of recording and managing information is central to the way people work. Since we started Infovark, I’ve had to manage more paper than I ever have before.
If you’re a knowledge worker, chances are that managing this information is essentially all you do. You write messages and documents, you go to meetings, you visit customers, you coordinate with coworkers, you take notes, and you use your brain to make decisions based on all of that stuff. It doesn’t matter if you are working in an industry or a more creative pursuit, you’ll still find your share of forms to fill in and documents to submit.
Computers changed the way enterprises work, because information artifacts that were once recorded on paper started to be recorded digitally instead. This saved space, and sometimes time, and often made it easier not to lose things. It also had two other advantages. First, paper can only be in one place at one time. It has to be physically transferred from one location to another, and generally moves at the speed of a truck. It’s far easier to move electronic bits around and they travel at nearly the speed of light. Second, it’s expensive and slow to duplicate information on paper. Making electronic copies happens at much faster rates and is such a trivial operation that computers do it all the time, usually without you knowing about it.
At first, enterprises thought that storing a record on a computer was a thing. It made sense at the time since disk space was at a premium. Our legacy thinking meant that we treated business artifacts as much the same, regardless of the medium (ink-on-paper or bits-in-transistors) that it was stored in. An enormous amount of time and energy was spent on implementing elaborate control systems to conserve disk space, just like we used to fret about running out of space in our file cabinets or bookshelves.
Nowadays, disk space is cheap. A 500 Gigabyte drive costs $99 at the local MicroCenter. As Nick Galemmo notes over on ITtoolbox, the same amount of storage in 1980 would have cost around $250,000,000. So if there’s one thing that we can afford to do with modern computers, it’s store stuff.
One of the defining trends of Enterprise 2.0 systems is that they store stuff. They store stuff regardless of whether it is finished, or a “proper” version, or a snippet of a comment, or a draft. They store the same thing multiple times, often in multiple places. They record silly things like employee blog jokes, and wiki pages that nobody will ever look at again. They capture recklessly.
Reckless capture is the concept that led Google to its position today. It’s what Sharepoint does with all those team meeting spaces. When in doubt, store it anyway.
At first this might seem frivoulous — wasteful, even. But in addition to storage, one other thing that computers could do well is separate signal from noise. And when it comes down to it, what you want from your system is answers, not efficient use of space. You want tools that help you make decisions. Get things done. Connect with people.
A lot of the reasons for the surge in virtualization technology comes from the fact that a lot of servers in server rooms all over the world are underused. They are super powerful, with loud fans and scary blinking lights. They live in their big, cold, antiseptic server rooms. Do you know what they are doing? Most of the time, not very much at all.
So, let’s capture as much of these information artifacts as we can. It’s not going to hurt the bottom line, and it can only help productivity. After all, nobody ever found a useful document lying around on a network share and complained about wasted disk space. Let’s give those massive servers something to do.
That reminds me, I gotta remind Ali about something…
Have you ever walked thru Google’s data warehouse in Ashburn? It’s amazing, and yes, a little scary. They have more security there than NASA. The doors operate with whole-hand print scanners, it’s amazing. But I bet with those acres of computers, only a fraction are being used as much as they could.
I have problems with my memory, so I have to write down things all the time. My desk gets messy with it all, just so that I have it in front of me. Eventually it will go into a list or task in outlook, OR *gasp*, go into TRIM…
I bought my brother a 500 GB hard drive for his birthday last year. I said good luck. I have a 200 GB that I bought 2 years ago that I haven’t filled up. Why? Because I’m too strict as to what I store… I’d probably lose less if I just saved it all and worried about it later.
What’s my point? I agree, store it all and let God sort it out…