Thursday, April 1, 2010

Complexity driven collapse applied to information management/access

Dare not be a documentalist.

We create more documents, more information and data, need more servers, more system units, more network bandwith, more regulation to manage data and information. More and more, ever...
Surrounded by process and business rules, this generates need for always more complex information access system. And complex consulting to manage the technical and organizational challenge around this.

I so enjoyed Clay Shirky's excellent new essay: "The Collapse of Complex Business Models" thanks to twitter: @mathewi and @rdeclermont

What Clay Shirky demonstrates is that when complexity is such that any move will be by nature very complex and generate negative value, collapse is the only solution to create value.
In the case of data and information, collapse could be shutting down tons of servers, loosing information and knowledge to become agile again (just like Bergson explained that we need to forget the past to be able to apprehend the future).

A "smart" collapse could be not shutting down the servers, but simply pretending to forget them and... setting an intelligent search to give access to everything.
To make a long story short : if organizing and archiving your emails and files is too time consuming and would make your job worthless, why not use a search that makes the relevant connections between all elements.
A fresh new start for your work habits if you accept to set aside your documentalist skills.

2 comments:

  1. Have your heard of Cloudera?

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  2. Yes. Looks like cool technology coming up in the enterprise space. At Sinequa we start to see projects with these technologies, one with cloudera actually. That's quite exciting.

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