While attending the recent Microsoft SharePoint conference in Seattle I noticed a thread around the growing issues of the changing and expanding information tide and the various and perhaps competing demands on using and controlling that information.
MOSS 2007makes it easier for people to collaborate in a number of ways, from simple collaborative sites for sharing documents, to blogs and Wikis. Allied to this is the ever growing email traffic, which, when you add voice mail and logged instant messenger traffic, leads to even greater volumes of “stuff”. The myth that this is no problem since disk space is cheap was also explored by Debra Logan who pointed out that it is naive to consider just the cost of the hardware, since it has related support, back up and even power costs.
There are other factors to consider relating to the torrents of text. It is one thing to just let information grow and grow, but there is also the need to be able to find the stuff later, if you can’t access it, how can you use it? This of course may just be in the normal course of daily work, someone looking up an HR Policy for example. But it may also be driven by legal requirements, for example e-discovery in the case of a law case. In which case having vast amounts of information with little or no structure can prove extremely costly. In any case having huge volumes of information can make the user experience for the seekers of truth very poor indeed. Of course a good search engine (such as those offered by MOSS and FAST) can help, but at the end of the day the search engine can only retrieve what is there – and if a lot of it is out of date rubbish then that will pollute the results with unnecessary noise.
There is yet another aspect to handing and presenting all this information which is slowly breaking out of its niche and that is “Accessibility”. Earlier I used the word “access” – this is significant and goes beyond just “finding” stuff. Accessibility relates to people with some sort of disability or limit to their ability, to access the information. Dana Simberkoff pointed out the way the need for this is growing, both because of legislation, such as “UK Disability Discrimination Act of 1995!, but also for the more pervasive affect of an aging workforce. It could just be the need to increase the browser font size when your eyes are tired (a condition I certainly recognize) – not something MOSS supports out of the box (but there is the "Accessibility Kit for SharePoint" – AKS that can help here). So the system, through a great search engine and good navigation might be able to “find” the information you need – but if you can’t read the small font, understand the language, or make out the diagram that uses low contrast colours then it is still something you cannot use. The value of information depends on at least four aspects, it’s content, it’s presentation, it’s discoverability and it’s relevance to the user – in other words, is the material correct, can you understand it, can you find it and is it pertinent to what you need.
Microsoft have now recognized that “accessibility” needs to be a theme throughout products like SharePoint and should be treated as a fundamental like security, but it will take time. For example there is the challenge of the tools such as “Silverlight” and SQL Reporting Services that can make information very appealing (gauges, fantastic graphs, etc) – but are they always that useful to every level of user, or are they in some cases making things harder to understand?
So there are a number of pressures on the use of collaborative content storing web based tools, such as SharePoint.
So we need to consider and plan for the need for;
Ease of content creation
Flexibility to allow users to create collaborative workspaces
The need for agility and speed of creation
The need to help make it easy to find the information later (metadata, structure, common terminology, etc)
The need to comply with the many & various legal requirements (some of which are still vague and untested)
The need to create and enforce workable policies
The key to all of this, and the subject of many of the talks, is “Governance”. There is a clear need to set up guidelines and policies to give a good chance of running a successful system (“Governance develops and manages consistent, cohesive policies, processes and decision-rights for a given area of responsibility.” Wikipedia).
There are many ideas around governance but key is the need to include a mix of senior business people, along with IT and potentially legal in the governance team.
Once there are legal compliance needs involved it is important to consider who, as individuals, are at risk and these are typically the CXO level people – this usually sharpens the minds of senior management.
Another important concept (again with thanks to Debra Logan) and one I agree with, is the need for an “Information Manager” role. As I see it this is a business rather than IT role to oversee, refine and enforce governance. The “Information Manager” is a role that can help with setting a balance between the desire for great agility, local autonomy, and control along with tight legal and ethical compliance.
This is a significant challenge given that companies frequently allow users to take the easiest way – the path of least resistance and often follow the herd without any long term thinking. But perhaps we are heading for the perfect storm – the need for more users to access the same information in different ways and for different reasons could be the final push to force companies into supporting a role that can guide them away from the impending information storm. The web wave is becoming a tsunami.