To tag or not to tag

Added By Tony Byrne at 16-Oct-2007 | Twitter: @TonyByrne |

Fellow analyst Mike Maziarka recently went over to the dark side (he now works for portal/middleware vendor BEA -- good catch for them). That's too bad, because Mike and I had a modest tradition of holding freewheeling "Town Hall" debates at industry conferences. There's one big topic where we could always disagree: tagging. Or "classification," for those with an info science bent.

Mike always argued that employees won't tag content, so we have to depend mostly on search -- particularly Googlesque text search, maybe fueled with some auto-extraction -- for our future information access needs. This is a very seductive argument, particularly since, as the trade press constantly reminds us, search technology is getting ever smarter.

My rebuttal is that, however difficult, classification is still frequently essential. For starters, very often employees are not given good tools to organize content. First you have to deal with "can't," then address "won't."

Let's talk about "won't," because there's a very big issue here around expectations of professional competence for information workers. I'm usually not one for citing sweeping transformations, but the world has changed fundamentally in the last 10 years. We shouldn't pretend that the huge waves of digital information sloshing through our enterprises hasn't fundamentally transformed the way we need to do business. Search technology is forever getting better, but with each heady R&D breakthrough we still fall further behind in the struggle to organize information for effective use in a business context.

This is why I think increasingly the role of the CIO will become less to provide information technology services, and more to effect an information management culture. Bob Boiko has been saying something similar for some time now (so it must be true!).

In fact, it seems to me that whoever serves as your chief HR officer may need to play a greater role here (and in some enlightened enterprises, already is). Why? Because in this environment, organizing digital information -- for yourself and on behalf of your enterprise -- has simply become an essential professional skill. Create-and-forget information creation will only be allowed for that subset of documents that aren't worth managing, and therefore aren't worth saving. For everything else, you need to put some thought into making it findable. In a world where there is too much information, rather than too little, the vaunted Subject Matter Expert is next to useless if no one can effectively access her expertise. Voodoo search technology is the last refuge of information anarchists.

So the enterprise that cares about the usefulness of its documents will give you the skills, tools, and incentives to drag them, frag them, flag them, and yes, tag them -- if only so information managers can ultimately ultimately bag them...legally. I'm not talking about dozens of metadata fields; meaningful document titles alone is a good start.

So start teaching your children how to organize information. Or better yet, let them teach you. If that doesn't work, you can check out our IOA (Information Organization & Access) certificate courses. Organizing information is hard. But information only has value if it can actually be found when it's needed.

Categories: Tony Byrne, Search and Information Access, Implementation, Information Architecture