We see a pattern in Data Organization, and it’s one we hope to change.
It goes something like this… New tools for organizing data come on line. People start using the tool. For the first few months or so, everything is wonderful. And then the volume of data reaches some kind of critical mass, and the efficiency of the tool starts to decrease rapidly.
In the days of 16k RAM packs and tape backups, I used to think it was just a matter of storage space. But space is the least of our problems today…
Take Wiki’s for example. I love Wiki’s. I’ve set up and used a bunch of them. But once they get to a certain size, Wiki Fatigue sets in. It becomes hard to find the data you’re looking for. You can’t figure out where someone on your team has put something. The organizational utility of the tool breaks down… In the worst cases, you’ve created a data Black Hole that sucks up information… And almost nothing escapes from a Black Hole…
And then there’s email. Almost no-one on the planet has an organized inbox. We all lose stuff in email all the time, from messages to attachments to updates we’ve made to attachments. Another Black Hole.
Local hard drives? Network folders? The list goes on. Any typical corporation is littered with disparate disconnected data silos, many of which turn in to Black Holes of one kind or another. And the pattern just keeps repeating. After you’ve used a tool for long enough and added enough data, it inevitably gets less and less efficient. And that usually leads to a new tool, which is great for a while until…
It’s time for that to stop.