During a presentation by Arnd Brugman of Sogeti at the Nite 09 event in Groningen (October 8 2009) on the subject "Het Nieuwe Werken" (The World of Work), he mentioned the importance of tagging.
The World of Work is a new view of how companies should work in a more "modern" way.
Key issues are:
- Technology
The World of Work needs to provide a platform were people can work on any location and have access to the right information and resources to work and collaborate wherever they are. - Inspiration
The World of Work requires inspiration. The people in the organization have the space to develop themselves, but also inspired to be the best they can be. - Organization
The World of Work requires a flexible organization. No command & control, just their own initiative and self control. - Culture
The World of Work requires a cultural change. A shift from one way to dialogue, from delegate to coaching, and from work or private to work and private.
Arnd's comment on the importance of tagging was directly related to the technology, to be specific: to the importance of tagging in a mixed environment of information sources like: mail, documents, contacts, tasks, etc...
In my opinion we do not only need tagging but especially meta-data tagging, where tagging restricts itself to use "keys" as tags, meta-data tagging usually works with key-value pairs. Another drawback on tagging is, often some tags behave like keys and in other cases as values.
So what are the benefits of smart meta-data tagging?
Let's take an example where a lot of information in spread over mail, task list, contact list , calendar and documents.
When all mentioned platforms provide the functionality to attach meta-data key/value pairs, being the meta-data tags filled-in automatically and/or manually, we can easily find back information and/or change the view on our information sets depending on the way we build up a search entry.
For example, we add a new task which is related to a project, so we attach a meta-data tag like “Project#=12345”
Assuming our information systems are all using similar meta-data-tags (most of them in an automated way, f.i. a project number is found in the Subject field of an email) we can now do smart searches like:
Show me all documents written by people who are involved on the project related to this task who are scheduled in my calender for the upcoming month and sent me an email on this project during the last 2 weeks.
Another example is that we can easily change the hierarchy in the presentation of data, so we are no longer bound to a fixed hierarchy.
Why is this important?
We still tend to think in the old days structure of data as if the world still consists of Cupboards, Drawers, Folders and Printed files.
By using technologies as described here we can release ourself of this 20th century way of thinking and step into “The Real World of Work” way of working and – more important - our way of thinking.
We now do not need to know how data is structured or filed, but are sure we can always represent information in a structure we need in every specific case.
Doesn't this take a lot of time?
So the first question could be: “Doesn't it take a lot of time to add all this extra meta-data tags, so I lose many ours per day in keeping up all information being tagged correctly?”
The answer is NO.
When you explain people what time management is, they will ask you the same question, but at the end you realize your saving a lot of time.
The same happens when data is correctly tagged. We do not need to spend a lot of time to file our documents in Cupboards, Drawers and Folders. We can even keep all data unstructured because the structure is now in the tagging. And don't forget that most tagging can be fully automated by implementing smart business rules or workflows, which has to be done once (and a while).
Resume
In the past 15 years the really successful CMSes I built or participated on were all using these meta-data tags.
So I'm still surprised that most Collaboration Suites lack or hide this functionality. At least I do not know any of the shelf product which guides you in using this way of structuring your data, while I'm convinced this is THE ONLY way to handle large sets of information.
Anybody out there who knows, please raise your hand!
