Let’s say I have an important keepsake – a gold necklace – that my mother gave to me, and I take it to a bank to keep it safe. After signing all the paperwork my branch manager takes me to the vault, opens the big door, and inside is a huge pile of gold, gems, precious paintings and statues. Then he takes my necklace, leans inside, and chucks it into the vault without a moment’s hesitation. I say “Hey! You can’t just heave it into the middle of all the other things!”, but he assures me it’s all right. They have a guy that will search through the vault whenever I need to recover my priceless heirloom.
Do you think this sort of scenario never happens? Think again! Corporations do it every single day. Modern corporations are built on the intelligent use of information and yet they take their crown jewels – their priceless heirlooms – and chuck them onto hard drives or into database repositories without much regard for whether they will ever see the information again. They always have “a guy” that will recover the information for them. If the information is especially important they may make a couple copies of it, which is smart, but then they do something dumb like not keep track of which copy is the original master copy. That’s a dumb thing to do because information is so malleable. Pop it into Word and make a few edits, and voila! A brand new copy very much like – but not exactly like – the original.
I know of one company that spends many millions of dollars each year managing all those almost identical copies of information. It takes time to reconcile histories and determine which copy is the correct one.
One solution to this problem is to use a special container for your priceless heirlooms – it’s called a safe deposit box. It’s a special place that you can find every time because you have a key that you carry around with you, and the key has a code written on the side of it. The code can be looked up each time you want to access the box. The result of the lookup is an instruction to the bank manager about where to locate the box.
Safe deposit boxes are fine for gold necklaces but this kind of control is too tight for a modern corporation, for which information is valuable only if it is used. The formula for Coca-Cola notwithstanding, there is almost no value to information that is kept locked in a safe. So instead, you put it in a place where other people can find it.
This is the difference between finding things and searching for things. Searching is so ubiquitous these days you might even think it is the only way to locate an information artifact. But this is not at all true – we have a long history of library science to help us put information where it is most convenient for somebody else to find it. The difference is in the importance of the data. If it is not particularly valuable – like this blog, for example – you chuck it onto the internet and somebody may find it and cherish it, as is always the nature of information. But if the information is valuable you should place it carefully in the right place.
As in real estate, the most important factors are “location, location, location”. Unlike real estate, information may exist in exactly one physical location but can have many virtual locations that map onto the same place. Like a card catalog that allows you to locate a book by author, subject or title, an information repository can have many virtual structures that will lead you to your cherished resource no matter how you decide to navigate to it. Why doesn’t search do the same thing? Come back in a couple of days for the answer…