Gordon described our upside-down take on Information Management priorities in his last post. We came to this topsy-turvy perspective after spending years implementing traditional business software and growing increasingly frustrated with recurring configuration, training and deployment issues. Infovark was born out of desire to try something different.

We decided to build Infovark from the ground up to serve the information needs of a typical knowledge worker. We consider the individual first, then the team, on up to the business level.

This led us to all sorts of interesting technical choices. But the hardest decision has had nothing to do with software at all. It’s a business decision, and one we’d been avoiding.

If we really want to put our money where our mouth is, if we really believe in a bottom-up, emergent approach to sharing and collaboration, Infovark needs to be sold differently than other enterprise solutions. After all, the traditional top-down focus on security, compliance, and cost is no accident. It’s a result of catering to the needs of the people that write the checks. If we really want to commit to making valuable, useful software for typical business users, we need to sell it to business users.

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I asked a customer the other day why they were running an Information Management project. Her answer was refreshingly honest:

“I’m not exactly sure,” she said, “It just seems like the responsible thing to do.”

It was a great answer, and it got me thinking about The Promise of Information Management. Why are people doing this stuff? What is it that IM tools and technologies are really designed for? In my experience, the hierarchy of needs for Information Management looks something like this, with each need requiring fulfillment from the bottom up:

The Conventional Hierarchy of IM Needs

At the bottom, there’s the mitigation of risk. Effectively managed information lowers the likelihood of bad things happening to your information, and as a consequence, to your organization.  Compliance is still the most common driver for people to invest in Information Management. That’s hardly a surprise since it’s the responsible thing to do. Any organization that faces public scrutiny needs to classify and control its information and implement consistent retention policies.

Higher up the pyramid, we encounter the reduction of cost. If we store our information effectively, we can spend less money storing things we don’t need. We can also recoup time spent on re-creating things we didn’t know existed. There are many ways that effective information management can reduce costs. (These are inevitably the things that end up in all the business cases, under the ROI section.)

Finally, at the pinnacle, there’s the incentive to innovate and to improve the way the organization functions — the ability to meet and exceed performance metrics and offer better solutions to customers, internal and external. Improved awareness, and greater access to knowledge. The benefits of efficient management of information result in people doing better business.

Inverting the pyramid

While these three tiers constitute the promise of information management, the reality is that the needs of knowledge workers are not being met by current IM solutions. Nearly all of the tools designed to manage information will be sold based on the benefits of improved productivity or designing better business process — but in fact are designed primarily to fulfill risk mitigation and/or cost savings. As an ECM consultant, I had to reconcile this bait-and-switch on a daily basis.

With Infovark Personal Edition now perilously close to its first public release, I find myself trying to determine how our new product fits into this information management promise. We’ve turned the pyramid upside down. We put innovation and knowledge awareness right at the bottom, as the platform that everything else is built on. Infovark contributes to cost saving only incidentally (our peer architecture doesn’t require any new servers or centralized storage) and we’ve actively removed a lot of the control, security and access barriers that compliance-oriented solutions offer.

The Infovark Hierarchy of IM Needs

We feel this aligns better with what the vast majority of business people actually need. Most knowledge workers don’t seem to care much about compliance or retention. That’s a management concern. They also seem largely uninterested in cost control. What we hear from people working with information daily is that they want an authoritative source of reliable information, the answers when they need them, and a way to learn what they don’t yet know. They focus on the revenue side of the equation, on pursuing opportunities, on delivering value.

What IM has traditionally seen as base level needs — retention, security  and control — we at Infovark see as advanced needs that can be addressed only once we have first fulfilled the more pressing needs of the individuals within the organization. You have to increase transparency and information awareness first, then optimize the way information flows, and only afterward can we look at what risk mitigation policies makes sense.

Yeah, the management team might not buy this approach. But we think everyone else will.

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Personal information is everywhere in modern systems. Most people have multiple user profiles, duplicate friend information, redundant login details, and several address books. All of this personal data is scattered across many systems.

Sometimes this is done deliberately, to provide better security or privacy, but it’s most often done incidentally, because not all of our systems synchronize with each other. Different facets of our identity reside in different places.

We’ve gotten used to this situation in public spaces on the Internet. Most of us take for granted the hassle of having to re-enter our profile data and re-establish links with our friends and peers. It’s the price we pay for an Internet that preserves anonymity.

Inside the walls of an organization, it’s a different story. It’s crucial to know who’s who. It’s important to have accurate, up-to-date contact information. But most of today’s enterprise systems contribute to the identity management problem. And the new breed of Enterprise 2.0 systems are only likely to make things worse in the near future.

Dealing with this explosion of fractured contact information is a hard problem. Dean and I have spent loads of time discussing grandiose, world-changing ideas to fix it all.

Then we gave up and decided that two guys in a basement weren’t going to be able to resolve these corporate identity management problems any time soon.

But we figured that something we could do was collect existing data and help people share that with their peers. So we added a template to support contact information.

Infovark and Contacts

Infovark captures contact information from Microsoft Outlook Contacts and shares them with your colleagues. We use the hCard standard to mark up contact information, so as to make everything  as interoperable as possible. hCard is itself based on the older vCard standard, implemented by virtually all modern email systems.

If you add your Outlook contacts folder to the list of mail folders Infovark monitors, you’ll see the contacts appear in your shared website:

Much like the way we handle files, if you update your contacts in Outlook, you’ll find they automatically update in Infovark, too. So while we haven’t figured out a way to solve the identity problem yet, we’re doing what we can to keep the problem from getting any worse.

Infovark will also automatically relate these contacts to the email and attachments you receive, helping to build a picture about what subjects your contacts know about. And because contact information is also tied to our user data, Infovark will notice which of your contacts interacts with your web site, and will learn about the things they care about too.

Infovark uses both sets of information to help you identify the right person to talk to about any particular subject. It’s an easy way to keep track of all your “go-to” people.

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