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I recently finished Keeping Found Things Found by William Jones. It’s subtitled “The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management” but I think it ought to read “The Study of a Practice…”
The book is intended as a broad survey of information management practices and principles that individuals use to manage information. This is not a how-to manual or a self-help guide. It’s written in the style of an introductory textbook, which is not surprising given that much of the content was developed as part of the Keeping Found Things Found Project, run by the Information School at the University of Washington.
The academic style of the writing might appeal to some, but I found it a slow read. The footnotes and citations often got in my way as I was trying to absorb the material. Each chapter begins with a lengthy introduction and ends with a point-by-point recapitulation of key messages. These are probably useful for a semester-long course, but it’s overkill for anyone wanting tips and tricks.
Your mileage may vary, of course. I’m not the target audience for a book like this. If you want a primer on the personal information management field, Keeping Found Things Found is a decent place to start.
We live in a world awash with information. Some of it is useful to us, but much of it isn’t. The point of information management is to keep the useful information easily accessible while ignoring the unhelpful bits.
This is an extremely challenging task, because we use information in a variety of different ways depending on our current situation. It also requires us to make some guesses about the future. How likely is it that we will need to recall or retrieve the information again? Is it worth memorizing it? Writing it down? Saving a hyperlink or adding a bookmark to our browser? We can’t predict our future needs exactly, so we often wind up storing more information than we need.
And that leads us to develop strategies for organizing it, indexing it, and searching it. And because we’re all different, there are almost as many different methods for keeping found things found as there are people. Some of the strategies — like the post-it notes stuck to your monitor — are obvious. Others are subtle, like keeping a mental list of go-to people that are experts in a particular topic so that you can ask questions as needed.
Having recently worked at a firm making records management software, I was familiar with much of the material in the book. The main reason for reading it was that records management focuses on large-scale organizational methods used by government and corporations to store, track, manage and dispose of information. I wanted to find out whether there were specific strategies that work well for individuals or small teams. Were there methods or tools that might help us refine Infovark’s design?
Well, I didn’t spot any, though some of the sources cited in the book might be worth checking out.
One of the book’s themes that connected with me was that we are really operating in a different age. The amount of information available to people is orders of magnitude greater today than in the past. Many of us now have music collections on our iPods that would have put independent record shops a few decades ago to shame. We have vast amounts of movies, television, and other video available to us on DVDs and streamed across the Internet. And then there’s the mountains of text and reams of financial data. All this content means that we’ve outgrown many of the concepts that guided us and tools we used in the past.
Gordon and I saw this clearly in our old job. It seemed silly — ridiculous, even — to expect a large organization to get a handle on its information when most of its employees have difficulty dealing with their own email inboxes. And companies can’t afford to train all their staff in the ways of research librarians so that they can manage the stuff on the corporate intranet. We need new approaches.
And we’ll keep reading, and talking with people, and attending conferences, and scouring the Internet, until we find them.
I just finished reading The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine, which Dean lent to me to read on the plane. Like lots of history novels, it’s chock-full of interesting facts and tales, and a large amount of it is written with the benefit of years of hindsight (which always makes the writer look much smarter).
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the story, it revolves around a mechanical “automaton” that apparently could play chess. In its 200 year lifespan, it played against (and beat) world chess masters, and chess aficionados, including Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.
Now there was obviously no computing power around in the late 1700′s to effectively program a machine, so The Turk (named for its oriental robe and turban) had to use some other kind of mechanism. Hidden inside the cabinet was a human chess player, with a second chessboard, who was ‘watching’ the game, through an elaborate mechanism involving magnets and levers. The Turk was, in effect, a conjuring trick.
The thing that made the Turk remarkable, and that led it to be the talk of the courts of Europe in the 1700′s was the notion that it could somehow ‘think’, and react to the moves made by it’s human opponent. The prospect of thinking machines held amazing promise for the future.
Nowadays, computers can play chess, and often extremely well — using a brute-force, compute all the possible moves approach to the chessboard. Now, this is impressive, but it’s not thinking. It’s much more mechanical and rigid than the way a human thinks about the problem. Add to that, the notion that all of these chess-playing rules have to be programmed by an army of human programmers to start with.
So, the Artificial Intelligence of the future is still there — in the future. Tasks requiring repetitive manual labor may have been replaced by robotic machinery, but the knowledge worker isn’t losing their job to thinking computers any time soon.
Even with the amazing advances in software, in search analysis and indexing, computers are really only good for two things — doing math, and remembering stuff. If you need information, you may well be able to find it through your enterprise software. But if you need the analysis and counsel that adds value to that information — maybe we could dare call it ‘knowledge’ — you need to connect with the most sophisticated thinking machine you will find in your organization — another person.
And that’s why social software is so important. It’s a lot like the Turk. Sure, It looks like the computer is helping you out — but really, there’s a guy hidden inside the cabinet…
The most discouraging thing about running a startup is how long it takes to start up. Maybe that’s why I found The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun such a great read. He systematically demolishes common misconceptions about how ideas get to market. Just skimming some of the chapter headings made me feel better:
The Myths of Innovation
We’ve absorbed these myths into our culture because they make entertaining and memorable stories, but innovation rarely works that way. Edison had a team of reasearchers working for him and trial-and-error was his primary means of refining ideas. The advertising industry owes much of its existence to the difficulty of getting people to try new products and services. Sometimes it takes years for a new development to reach consumers, as was the case with 3M’s laughably weak glue formula eventually becoming the blockbuster Post-It note.
It’s good to be reminded of these counterexamples. The idea is often the easy part. It’s the execution that’s hard.
We’re big fans of Clay Shirky. We cited his work twice in our Seminal Articles for Enterprise 2.0 post. So naturally his new book, Here Comes Everybody, was required reading.
Here Comes Everybody
To summarize the book in one paragraph, Here Comes Everybody is an exploration of the effect of the Internet on society. Clay’s central thesis is that the Internet and related technologies have dramatically lowered the barriers to information sharing and group formation. As a result, new sorts of social groupings have emerged and many previous assumptions about organizations have been overturned. The effects of this are subtle and pervasive, and modern society is just beginning to adjust to the new logic of group structure and dynamics.
Two examples of these new kinds of groups include the open source movement and flash mobs. He also discusses the communities that form around Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.
There key difference between these groups and organizations established without the new technologies is cost. Prior to the Internet, coordinating a group of people to do anything imposed relatively heavy costs. It took time, money, and effort to coordinate and direct people. But those costs have fallen dramatically in recent times. Where before you needed funding, offices, employees and experts to build complex software, write encyclopedias, or collect and organize a photo exhibition, you can now do so with volunteers working in their spare time.
Not all of these groups succeed, of course. Most of them don’t produce anything of lasting value. But since the cost of forming these groups is so low — requiring just a “Promise, Tool and Bargain” to get started — it leads to massive experimentation. With low barriers to entry and a large enough scale, trial and error emerges as a viable strategy. It leads to innovations that in the past would never have passed institutional muster.
Here Comes Everybody is a thought-provoking read. The explanations are clear, the anecdotes well told, and the analysis hits close to the mark. Others, notably Nick Carr, have taken issue with Clay’s enthusiasm for his subject (read their ongoing debate on britannica.com) but I found it helped knit the book together. You can’t understand the changes happening to the Internet and society today without understanding the viewpoint of technologists and technophiles like Clay Shirky. A lot of us are caught up in the Internet revolution, and we’re determined to follow it as it unfolds.
One of the recurring themes at E2.0 Last week was the notion of Generational Adoption. It’s the idea that Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y all had an innate relationship with various ways of working, and that these different work habits are a major factor in the adoption of new technology. Jay Hariani at the e2.oh blog has a nice wrap up of the generational adoption meme. Since then, Ross Mayfield, Jeff Nolan, and Larry Dignan have all chimed in, with various cases for and against.
I was lucky enough to share a drink last week with with Rob Salkowitz, Author of Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap, who was presenting at the E2.0 conference. I haven’t read Rob’s book yet, but In the wake of our conversation, I am definitely going to check it out. (Venkat’s Review over on RibbonFarm is also a good read).
I have big problems with using the generational argument to drive adoption of Enterprise 2.0. It feels like another vendor-inspired bogeyman designed to convince companies to buy heaps of software they don’t need. (Install our compliance software or Sarbanes-Oxley will get you!)
The notion that the millennials are going to “demand” some kind of “Facebook” to do their work is just plain rubbish. Think about when you joined the workforce. What exactly did you demand?
When I first left school for the workforce, I wasn’t in a position to demand anything. It took me five years of working within the system before I realized which parts were broken. And it was only because I’d put in the time working within the system that I was trusted to actually influence things a bit.
Generational change happens gradually. There’s not going to be some giant “MySpace Revolution” where “The Kids” take over with their externally hosted collaborative tools. Instead, these people will join the workplace as wide-eyed and impressionable new starters, and they’ll do their best to work within the framework that they are given with the tools that are allocated to them. Then, slowly, their own ideas will become part of the way people work, including their favorite tools and technologies.
Sure, the generational issue is interesting from an anthropological perspective. It’s indicative of a lot of things, most notably progress in society. But as a call to arms for business to rush out and spend cash on some new-fangled social media tool for your enterprise, it leaves a lot to be desired.
(But hey, what would I know. I’m just a disgruntled Gen X’er who has no respect for authority, right?)