Information Architecture as Scaffold

When those of us who think about IA think about IA, its is usually the relationships between different bits of information and how you represent that in useful, occasionally rational ways.

But Ton Zijlstra hit me between the eyes the other day with a comment he left on the Blog as Social Software post. he said this;

Last night in a conversation with Lilia Efimova, I said that even if all my postings would get lost right now, it wouldn't really matter, because of the relationships that exist because of it. If those relationships are still clear to me, the information flow will be reconstructable.

I hadn't thought of it in that way before, but Ton has hit a brilliant nail on the head. Information not as architecture, but as scaffold.

All builders need a scaffold to create the building, and none are more crucial than those building arches.

I don't know the etymology, but it makes sense that architects should come from arches, people who can build magical structures should be commemorated in the language

The point about an arch is that it can't exist without the scaffold, and once you take away the scaffold that supports its building, the arch remains, bridging a gap in the structure. Bridges, naturally, being the acme of the art.

And that, my friends is what information does; it provides the scaffold that bridges the gap between people. A bridge that we call a conversation. And once you have built the bridge, you can take away the scaffold and it doesn't make any difference, the conversation can continue because it no longer has any need for the information on which it was built, it has its own information; a history of itself, on which to draw and whenever the relationship is invoked, it uses any old bits of information lying around to propagate itself.

But what about all this KM stuff then? Could we delete all that and resurrect it out of the relationships in an organisation?

Disclaimer: There is some stuff you need to retain for purposes that have nothing to do with the organisation at all. Statutory document and records management for one, contracts and specific terms of agreements/ policies for another. But that is not what I'm talking about here.

What about all that proprietary information? All that business process IP? All those templates and legacy documents and previous sales pitches and so on? Surely the business can't run without that?

I think it can. I've been inside firewalls and tried to pull together legacy information to repurpose and the process is agonising, time wasting and largely fruitless because;

1. The stuff is usually document based and, along with Semple and Weinberger and others, I think documents are an anchor round the neck of information flows.
2. There is precious little that is original or unique in those documents. The longer people have been using the system, the more incestuous it will become; constantly reiterating the same stuff over and over, including the mistakes.
3. The more unique material there is, the less applicable it is to what I'm doing now. Its the "business objects" problem; make them too specific and you can't link them, make them too open and you can't use them.
4. Search produces either too much to work with or so little it is useless. it often also produces the stuff that you already know because the terms you use to search will be the ones you are used to using and you are used to those terms because you are already familiar with the material so you don't need the material anyway.

The reality is that you mostly write the whole proposal/ bid/ sales pitch from scratch anyway, even the boilerplate about the business has to be adapted to the current application. The fact is that you get the final document not from previous documents but through a gift economy.

I sit my group round a table, real or virtual, I explain the opportunity, they use that to filter their knowledge, experience and networks and give me some of that information and some of those contacts that they think fit the bill. The better the quality of the filtered knowledge, the higher my esteem and the greater their social capital and reputation.

I learn from what amounts to their exec summaries of their life experience, talk with their people, put the case and those people give me back a filtered response from which I learn some more.

We iterate this process formally and informally as many times as are justified by the scale and value of the opportunity we want to exploit until I can write, from my now present knowledge, a draft. To which they again apply their resources, correcting, tweaking and expanding as we go.

Yes I need to check a fact, a contractual term or a qualification, but the dream that I can somehow capture enough "knowledge" and make it available in a sufficiently flexible, usable form that my organisation can substitute technology and information for people and institutional memory is a crock.

I'll go further, well I usually do.

The best measure of a surviving organisation is that (exceptions as above) I could delete all documents over a month old and nobody's heart rate would rise except the IT manager.

I'll go further still.

I could do that in most organisations today and most people would hardly notice.

The Audio version - 4.4MB mp3

Comments

[Julian Elve]

Actually I suspect the IT manager would rejoice - think of the costs that would reduce!

[Julian Elve]

I think your assessment of search is spot on - it's far more useful to know who are the right people to speak to, than to be able to find a collection of documents written for another context.

Context is critical. I'd say that a substantial part of the reason that it's so difficult to re-use documents, even ones you wrote yourself, is that without the context in which they were written it is often impossible to tell, or recall, why certain things are in there at all.

This is the power of using social tools such as blogs and wiki alongside the creation of outputs such as proposals and contracts - if used well they capture the context.

In practice we stumble over people's reluctance to learn new tools under the pressure of deadlines...

[Jon Husband]

Actually I suspect the IT manager would rejoice - think of the costs that would reduce!

Thus far, from what I've seen, I doubt this .. the fear of losing power and control outweigh, I think, the tempting prosepct of reducing cost.

Because, along with the cost reduction, significant culture change towards you-know-what is necessary.

But I could be, and probaly am, wrong.

Doc Searls once wrote a brilliant (imo) post on how blogging scaffolds meaning (if you want, I can find it relatively easily). I couldn't agree more. It's all about learning from each other and growing meaning, building understanding and increasing the density of added-value connections.

[Earl Mardle]

Jon.

Yes please, point us to it.

Damn the Doc, here I was thinking I thunk an original thort again.

[Ton Zijlstra]

I love the scaffold / arch metaphor Earl. (Whether you think it was an original thort you thunk there or not :) )
I'll be using that.

And I think I might try out your last thoughts about deleting company documents with a few people as well.

To me KM never has been about 'storing knowledge' I feel. Knowledge is in people's head and forms the ability to act. Information can be stored, but is only part of how K is build, it also needs experience, skills and attitudes (aka as context). Knowledge management then is facilitating people doing knowledge base work.

A thought that crossed my mind while reading : are some companies so gung ho on storing information and documents and calling it storing knowledge because they intuite that the relationships aren't there, so they can't afford to loose the info? At least on a organisational level? Every org has little groups where there are relationships of course, but that might be sub-optimal across the whole org. But to delete your docs, you'll need to be able to nurture and sustain relationships company-wide as well across company boundaries to all your stakeholders.

Oops, I've just boarded a train of thought here, gotta go! ;)

[Julian Elve]

I'm reminded of a comment 10+years ago by my then boss - "Throw the paper away - if it's important someone else [elsewhere in the organisation] will have a copy!"

[Julian Elve]

Picking up on the IT Manager would rejoice thread again, speaking as one, I think they should. Apart from the cost of storing all those useless files, there are serious implications for compliance with things like data protection - if you have the information you have to have a way of finding it and disclosing it in response to requests.

Many organisations have some kind of records policy, which if thorough will address the issue of destroying non-core documents after their useful life as well as making sure the stuff that has to be kept is kept.

In my experience the problem is making people delete stuff - given the difficulty of finding documents and (without context or meta-data captured at the time) deciding whether they need to be kept or not, most people argue that hard disk space is cheaper than their time. Of course that's not the whole story...

However if we want people to capture context, there is still a lot more we can do to make it easier. Even as an avid proponent of blogs, wikis etc., I find that under time pressure I will fall back to the default process of writing documents and circulating them for review; to maintain a visible record of context and conversation means maintaining a seperate artefact.

Applying the art of the possible, my own particular "push back" is to encourage (by example) the use of wikis for documents which do not need a seperate formal life - for example project plans and related stuff, reserving the document review approach for things like contracts.

[Jon Husband]

Julian .. I absolutely agree with you and support you on they should .. and yes, there is so very much that can be done to make it easier to capture, share, and refine context.