This highly prejudiced and personal article was prompted by my need to check my understanding or compare notes on the current state of information management.
Like many human activities, information management crosses a complex of communities. It should be as well-bounded as medicine or space exploration and should be easily recognisable when it is being done. It should contain some well-defined sets of craft skill, some well-defined science and technology, much inevitable overlap and connectivity with other areas of human activity, some household names, and a decent conference circuit or two. However, it appears to be fragmented and riddled with conflicts of craft and technology that verge on the religious.
Information is much on the minds of ordinary people these days and not, it seems, in a good way. Microsoft's Bing now has a TV commercial which raises the dire problem of Information Overload and offers the solution: it's not a search engine, it's a 'decision engine'. Clearly, people knowing the answer isn't what's on sale here.
The thing is, many spheres of information management challenge us: a world-sized sphere made by the Internet; a work-sized sphere made by our intranets; and a personal sphere. Unless we are assiduous in maintaining separation between these, the interlacing is pervasive throughout every part of our information world, with a few islands of separation for work and some personal private space.
Let's look at the emergence of these different information spheres beginning with 'provided' information management spaces. SharePoint potentially offers an ideal model of hierarchically nested teamsites, providing virtual, shared document management and communication spaces. However, they are profoundly hypertextual in their relationships, as some very large organisations have found to their dismay when they released SharePoint with little regulation or guidance. The organic complexity of the emerging links between teamsites is based on simple need and political trading. It quickly becomes impossible to map to the point where knowledge-sharing becomes mired in a collaboration space jungle of tribal villages, scarcely advanced from Windows NT fileshares.
The 'collaborative' environment story looks more mature than it is. At the time of writing SharePoint is desperately dependent on a clean, well-designed and very lightly bespoke implementation to succeed. However, there is a convincing case that most of the technology needed to build a rational model of very large information spaces is here now no matter what the brand of the platform: SharePoint, Drupal, Plone, or a new contender yet to appear.
In the 21st century we know there is more information than ever before - around 1300 exabytes according to a recent report in the Economist. So what? The amount of information that existed before this century was not inconsiderable. People located the information they needed pretty much as well as we do now and were also able to store most of it. Now production has outstripped storage by 600 exabytes.
My most profound worry is that we are seeing the emergence of almost separate belief systems around information management: the existing separation of information as technology and information as meaningful content, which is magnified by the appearance of new information professional tribes. The connectivity, let alone the collaboration between any of them, is not healthy. Under the label of 'architect', in technology alone we have network architecture, application architecture, and storage architecture. We also have the information architecture of wireframes and site maps, and of accessibility (designing a web experience for disabled people). Content architecture always comes disturbingly late to any web-based project, but I like to believe it is in there.
There is some residual blurring between these still emerging occupations. Many of FUMSI's readers will have read widely throughout the information industry, and I'm guessing, have found the same disjuncture of language: the language of Grady Booch, of Ranganathan, of Jakob Nielsen. They are sufficiently similar to suggest that their bodies of practice deal with the same subject matter, but their definitions and usage concepts of 'entity' or 'space', for example, are different. And similar but different is more dangerous than plain good old-fashioned different.
My thesis then is that the genesis of this information management Tower of Babel is the historic failure of information science to connect fully to any large-scale business requirement in the public or private sectors, with the possible exception of the pharmaceutical industry.
There is a body of work, and a body of thinkers and practitioners, that provide continuity from the established canons of registries, libraries and archives to the present day. They are well-reported and active in communities represented by FUMSI, and by ISKO's Knowledge Organisation journal. However: there is a set of beliefs, expectations, anecdotes, and behaviours that is widely extant in the IT community that is now being promulgated amongst the information science community. Data owners don't tag. Authors don't tag. Nobody tags, and especially nobody does keywords.
It is surprisingly difficult to locate a trustworthy and properly controlled test of these assumptions. As far as I can tell, the evidence for user resistance to adding keywords is based on time-constrained implementation of information technology based infrastructure programmes. Even the excellent Addison-Wesley's book on SharePoint, which recommends a rigorous approach to metadata and structuring information verging on 'content architecture', says pleasant things about librarians and cites 45 seconds as the average user tolerance for the task of adding keywords..
The curious preference for depending on arcane, marginally testable and frequently under delivering algorithms that make up all of the various search, sentiment, and discovery 'engines' over a systematic and demonstrably reliable means of organising and retrieving information, is a conundrum. But we cannot resolve the conundrum by tackling it in and of itself, but through the failure of information management that results from that very conundrum itself. Moreover, that failure has yet to reach a widely recognised moment of critical under delivery, a crisis of 'filing and finding'.
Ironically, that crisis could well be brought about by the 21st century Internet itself. With Google, broadband and XML, Twitter and Facebook, the web has moved from static publishing to fully interactive broadcasting, authoring, collaborating and sharing. The new speed is about immediacy of transactions and access. The user experience is based on efficient web applications, but the underlying trend remains the same: the totality of information is increasing exponentially. There is no evidence that any system which applies a set of algorithms can currently approximate the human capability for metaphor, 'looks like', 'is good enough', 'is better than', 'is preferred to'. I wouldn't claim that the universe of human knowledge and its attendant complexity will always grow faster than our ability to write algorithms to penetrate it, or to write algorithms that write algorithms to penetrate it, but I am confident that it won't happen soon enough to do anything other than cosmetically obscure a profound information management crisis.
There may be the problem: we are so good at CGI that we are better at imagining the conquest of space in High Definition 3D, than exploring space for real, and yet we are living in the dawn of the Space Age. Maybe we should accept that this is still only the dawn of the Information Age. The exploration of 'information' has only just begun, but rolling back my information metaphor to the early 20th century, we don't just have a Scott, an Amundsen, or a Shackleton, but great tribes of Scotts, Amundsens and Shackletons of information exploration. Information is the wild frontier, the shopping mall and the industrial revolution, in which those tribes of explorers blunder about, studiously ignoring each other's expeditions.
And jeez, if you don't want the yammering Pod People from the Bing commercial to get you, buy yourself an A to Z, or get the A to Z app for your iPhone, because the professionals can't agree how to help you.
Mark Field has worked in knowledge and information management for over 25 years. Currently working in the UK Civil Service, his views are no reflection on his employers' as he will obsess about the need for systematics in information management, a highly subversive position. He set up the 39th .org.uk domain, one of the first 20,000 websites in the world, deployed the second Apple Internet Server in the UK, and organises his books by size and colour.
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This highly prejudiced and personal article was prompted by my need to check my understanding or compare notes on the current state of information management.
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