Click on the title of this post to go to a groovy link from youtube about the ideas in Everything is Miscellaneous.
I spent an hour and a half the other day trying to persuade one of my users not to create a folder called ''Communications". He wanted somewhere to put all of his emails. I tried to explain that they would be filed better in a relevant subject file...for example the emails about widgets should live in a Widgets file.
Well, we discussed it for a while and then I got to thinking..."does it really matter?" I mean he's the one who works with the information, not me. He's the one who has to find it and use it again, not me.
Should I just let users build whatever file structure they want to build, so long as they can find the stuff they're working on?
Ah, if only it was as simple as that...I don't really think my users can always find the stuff they're working on. Some of them don't like using the Search facilities either...so they email links to each other...the dialogue goes...Hey, where's that document you wrote about "Left-handed widgets"?...Here's the link to it.
They call stuff 'Doc1' and put it in a folder called General which is in a folder called Miscellaneous...and then they tell me my system's garbage cos they can never find stuff.
They aren't ready for everything being miscellaneous yet. They can't even cope with everything being where they left it...or where they want it to be...
17 November 2007
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What is harder than herding cats? Getting information into folders.
So much of the information we create is already tagged, for example, all the files in my organisation have a "State Water" tag, and then are tagged by the division creating them, the date, the author, the subject, the document title and possibly more, automatically. I mean that "just happens" because they are created on our computer system. Now, why would I then insist that the corporate records system requires the users to assign terms from the BCS? If my BCS worked, wouldn't those terms appear in the title, perhaps? If not, couldn't I have a folder at a macro level with the best BCS terms predicted for that information? If its the engineers, then "facilities and assets maintenance" seems pretty close. If I insist they also include the name of the structure they are working on, then along with the automatically created metadata referred to earlier, that might be sufficient structure. And the user only had to select one high level term aqnd ensure the name of the main structure appeared somewhere. So what if they get 1000 hits on "Wyangala Dam" - its the largest structure we control, and either browsing or searching can reveal "plans" "invoices" "valves" or whatever, from "browse within results". Isn't that simple?
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