That Coyote bloke got me thinking again this morning:
“you need time to see the links between items or areas of knowledge. The brain finds it hard to hang on to disconnected pieces of information. Unlike a computer disc, it doesn’t cope well with large amounts of more or less random data. What it does best is to see connections, linking information together and remembering the patterns, not single pieces of data. Remembering a principle and applying it is far easier to do that recalling some individual “rule” or procedure for handling a situation. Do we see those links instantly? Usually not. It takes time to register them fully and understand them well enough to recall them whenever we want.”
So why do so many of our enterprise information systems do such a poor job of reflecting the links that we have built in our minds between things, and do an even worse job of allowing us to see the links that other individuals have created.
Let’s look at a few example. In the file system I can group a load of files into a folder so that they are all together, but this doesn’t reflect the links that exist between the document. I regularly open a number of files to find the information that I am looking for. I know it’s in one of them because that’s why they are there but there really isn’t any visible linkage. Someone else looking at the set of documents would need to read them all to get a handle on the information contained within.
Document management systems are rarely any better they allow the person who has posted the document to give it a set of key words and to build the taxonomy. Anything information that follows on from this document isn’t reflected and the likely value of each document that has been tagged with a certain keyword isn’t shown either.
Take documents as an entity, particularly technical documents. They are usually a huge blob of data with thousands of internal logical links. The data in this section relates to the data in that section, but we rarely do anything to flag those links. As the links aren’t explicitly shown we need to take in a huge amount of data before we can understand where the links are. It’s rarely possible to structure a technical document in a way that actually makes these links obvious. Lots of people have started making documents out of PowerPoint presentations, it’s something I encouraged initially but now I’m not so sure. The problem with a document is the huge blob problem, the nice thing about a PowerPoint structure is that each page makes a point or a small number of points in this way the huge blob is broken down into a set of smaller blobs. These ‘presentations’ are never going to be presented, they are meant to be read as a set of small chunks which allow people to form their own links.
Blogs are slightly better, assuming people follow the etiquette. Part of the etiquette of blogs is that you do someone the courtesy of referencing their ideas, and rightly so. Because blogs are normally a smaller chunk of data and the links are built in it’s possible to work backward down a subject. Services like track-back and technorati also allow you to follow the links forward.
Tagging services like del.icio.us provide a new way of reflecting the links. They allow items to be tagged by the person consuming the document. Rather than the person who created the item defining the value, the person consuming it does. This capability has taken on the rather ungainly term of folksonomy.
The ability to move beyond taxonomy into folksonomy is rarely available inside an organisation though. Some organisations are getting there – IBM, HP (PDF) (Thanks for the info Stu).
What makes someone tag inside an organisation and how many people does it take. I’m not yet clear about all of the factors that make someone tag, but I can speak from my del.icio.us experience. There are a few reasons why I tag. The main one is a really simple one, I want my voice to be heard. I have valid opinions (or so I think) and I want them to be heard. I’m sure that if I was able to tag within my organisation I would feel exactly the same. Another really important reason is that I tag for my own benefit. As the Coyote says, it take time to register the links in our brains, being able to register the links somewhere helps me to find them in the future. Registering a link also helps me to remember them, I regularly write things down so I don’t forget them, I rarely use the written record because the act of writing it down has implanted the information in my brain, tagging has a similar effect.
We have a long way to go with exposing links, and the value to us humans is in the links rather than in the actual data. The current technologies will take a while to become mainstream in most enterprises, and even longer for the process and social changes to become common practice. There is, however, a new generation who will expect these services to be available and business constrain them at their peril.
Tags: del.icio.us, taxonomy, folksonomy, learning
Graham Chastney 