Being an Information Manager...

Re-coupling

Architecture is a lot about de-coupling - this is trying to ringfence functionality in order to manage complexity, allow specialisation and allow improvements through 'service management'. This trend has happened for many years in the industry, but now a new trend is emerging: re-coupling. Some examples:

• travellers now book their own flights (and not via the travel agent - the old point of de-coupling)


• bank customers do their own data entry (and not the back office in the bank)


• specialist processing activities can be carried out by non-specialists

This trend is interesting, since in information management we see that the de-coupling of e.g. data related activities has quite often not happened and now we see more information related activities moving back to the user again.

Is this a good trend? I think it is not in the case of running a business. If we can move certain information related activities to information handling professionals (e.g. data receipt, basic QC, cataloguing, help with retrieval services, etc.) then we will make the more expensive engineers more effective. So bottom line - before we start re-coupling (which seems to be more a consumer trend), let's focus on de-coupling of services related to information management.

Labels: architecture

posted by Evert Ruijs @ 1:23 PM