Freedom vs Control
Information Managers (and also IT people) have the tendency of trying to get things under control. That's why we put a password on everything and that's why many systems are cumbersome to use - would you really want to add these 20 mandatory attributes with the document? Do you really need to go through these 6 steps of approval?What we sometimes forget is that we manage information on behalf of the users. We are there for them, and not the other way around. So to really be successful as an information manager we need to sometimes challenge our own natural inclinations of building in more security than needed, or more meta data than feasible. Some of the measures I described in the item about Hoarding are therefore more than a user can accept.
One of the measures I mentioned was getting rid of shared drives. But maybe this is a typical dictatorial action, with the information management goals made more important than the user. But do we really want to do this? Recently I noticed a colleague taking this brave measure in his organisation. I fear that he will fail, since the technology offered as an alternative is not as simple as a file system ... and therefore users will look for shortcuts that will defy the purpose of this measure. Dictatorship leads to terrorism!
I have already written a lot about the Web2.0 - how we can add a lot of value by increasing the freedom of users in terms of how they classify information and how actually opening up our security model will be beneficial as well. Still we like to have control - that's just natural behaviour, but my view is that we should not get this control by confining the users too much. We can also get this control in an easier way via automated means:
- We should not spend too much time setting up complex taxonomies, but should be investing in automatic tagging mechanisms based on master reference data.
- We should not spend too much time in asking people to clean up their old information, but have automatic archiving procedures based on where people store it. This gives people the freedom to collect what ever they like
- We should not have complex security models, but have 'buckets' that are open and areas that are closed.
This is all technically very easy and is more about a changed mind set (behaviour) than anything else. At the same time it will help the users, since it will not put too many restrictions on them.
Labels: behaviour, meta data, security, tagging
posted by Evert Ruijs @ 9:47 PM
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