Information Management

Information management is material relating specifically to the management of information in an enterprise. All information technology, by definition, is within this topic, but so too is management processes and techniques.

All About Information Taxonomies – Yet Another Blog

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Further to the Ark Group presentation on information taxonomies on Wednesday, Ark Group have put forward a moderated forum for the further discussion and comment on Information Taxonomies.

You can click here for further information.

The welcome message is reproduced below:

“Welcome to the Ark Group Taxonomy Forum. Following on from Designing a Business Focused Taxonomy, we felt that it would be useful to start a discussion forum. The way that the discussion and topics progress is entirely up to you – the members.

Ideally, all discussions should be targeted towards particular business issues that you face with your taxonomy project. Please feel free to introduce yourself and organisation and your particular area of interest.”

To make omelettes, you have to break eggs – but do it very, very carefully!

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Last week I presented to Ark Group’s Business Information Taxonomies Conference on the topic “Understanding the Purpose of Your Taxonomy and Ensuring Business Adoption” at the Avillion Hotel.

My uploaded presentation can be found here.

In case you are wondering, a (very loose) definition of information taxonomy is a way of classifying and categorising the creation of unstructured information in a way that lets you more easily identify what is contained in the document, and how it relates to areas of your organisation. Although this helps with the search process (you can determine at a glance what a document is about rather than full-text searching for it).

One of the interesting things I discovered at the conference was the presentation by Verity on their tools, one of which (Verity Profiler) claims to be able to automatically classify a document into a taxonomy with about 85% accuracy.

The underlying theme of my presentation, however, was that generally people in business are very good at presenting the benefits of an information taxonomy, but are rarely able to really articulate a low-risk methodological approach to actually implementing the information taxonomy (or business classification scheme) in a way that actually has people use it.

So the benefits are fairly clear, but our ability to state how it is to be done, and to convince business management that it will actually achieve real outcomes, is often less clear.

So as I say, to make omelettes, you have to break eggs – but do it very, very carefully in case you break the business too!

OpenDocument Standards

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ZDNet is reporting on the new OpenDocument standard (approved by OASIS) that may “turn the world inside out” (which, frankly, is one of those phrases to use when hyperbole just isn’t enough). It does promise great things, as the promise of sharing documents independently of the application that created them may finally become a reality (although, predictably, Microsoft advises it refuses to support an inferior standard and will accordingly go its own way).

I suspect we shouldn’t hold our breath in this regard. However, if there is enough momentum to using it, the potential for open source software applications to really become usable (e.g. OpenOffice) would become very high. I personally use OpenOffice at home and for almost everything I do it is perfectly OK. I do remain sceptical of the great and wonderful features that are packed into Office most of the time – I mean, seriously, does anyone ever use the Version Save feature of Word? And if you do, do you hope and pray it won’t corrupt your document?

(PS in case you are wondering what the reason is for the gap in publishing my blogs, the gap is due to the birth of my baby daughter, Olivia Grace on 9th September. Parenthood – it’s good for family life, bad for blogging).

Copernic Desktop Search Tool – More Thoughts

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In an earlier post I discussed my search for a desktop search tool in some detail, and promised that I would have a later post with some reasons why you wouldn’t use Copernic (or indeed any other search tools).

This is that post.

Since the earlier post was written I have noticed that it was picked up by Copernic and added to their “blogs and user posts” page. Which is fine by me, but here are some of the potential problems of these technologies.

Firstly, if you do download your own software and install it you fear the wrath of God in the form of your systems administrator if your network policy indicates that software can only be installed by IT Support. Which is a fair enough requirement on their part – a network is a subtle and fragile thing, and the last thing it needs is you blundering all over it – so get permission from your administrators!

May I also suggest that if you download it anyway and install it, you don’t then blog about it :=).

Some problems these tools cause for networks include:

  • Increased Network Traffic: These tools regularly (every four days or so) go out and crawl the network directories you nominate, and index the files it finds. This increases network traffic and although the tool is fairly low-footprint on your own PC, on the network server it can cause a bit of grief (which, in a large organisation, you will not be thanked for if you bring down the server). This is particularly a problem if you have LOTS of people on your network creating similar havoc.
  • Slower Performance: These tools work by grabbing files you work on and indexing them as you save them – that is how they pick up files you work on rather than waiting for four days. There can be a small drop in performance – but probably not noticeable – in your local PC. Copernic in particular seems to play nice with the PC in its context.
  • Storage Access Networks: Oh dear – if you use Copernic and set it up to crawl through 1 gigabyte of old documents sitting on a storage access network (say, slower, older, but larger capacity, network drives mapped seamlessly to your network drives), these SAN’s decide that you’ve opened the file (which you have) and promptly move it all back to your smaller, faster network drives that are meant for active files only. And that is a great way to see if your system administrator can physically turn purple, given the storage margins many organisations run with these days.
  • I Can’t Believe It’s Not A Document Management System: Well, actually I can. Copernic Desktop Search Tool is a good, personal, tool for finding files quickly. It is not an EDRMS, and is not really a scalable solution to fit organisational requirements of an EDRMs. Be aware that Copernic and its peers are not intended as EDRMS solutions. By the same token, it’s a lot easier and less overhead than having to profile and fill out the metadata for documents before saving them (which is what EDRMS’ rely upon) – but of course the downside is that your searching abilities and strategies need to become a lot more sophisticated to find anything. And of course these days EDRMS tools are really migrating/integrating to content management systems and thus delivering your content to the web in a managed framework – again, something Copernic will never do.

Having said all that, I am now using it but pointing it to my local drives where most of the havoc can go away. The negatives really relate to desktop search tools in general rather than Copernic in particular, which continues to be a reliable tool as far as I am concerned.

There are probably a couple of other issues that will come to mind – but I can’t think of anything more at the moment.

Goodbye Password, Hello Security!

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Hot on the heels of Microsoft’s man-of-the-moment comments on passwords – he suggested you should write down passwords down in a “very secured place” rather than forcing users to remember umpteen dozen passwords – comes this article on CIO.com suggesting that the password has had its day.

An interesting thought, yet to be proven, and until we see some true standards there I think we’ll have the password for a while longer. Of course, I continue to live in fear that one day I will forget all my passwords and I will simply cease to exist.

Postscript: a recent anecdote of a client who accidentally encrypted an assignment at uni through vainly bashing at the keyboard is a salient lesson to those of us who have ever wanted to take a computer out back and teach it a lesson.