We tend to worry a lot more about our cool mobile devices than the information they manage, but ultimately it really is all about the data. My experiences over the holidays reinforce the need for a lot more thinking - and perhaps new services - in this area.
OK – back on track: the Great Office Cleanup of 2010 is (mostly) done. The process of cleaning out the files of the past 20 years (and hauling – no joke – about 1.5 tons of paper to the recycling bin), though, brought up a number of issues that may very well be thematic for 2011 and beyond, all involving access to and the management of information.
If you’re like me, you live or die by you ability to obtain, evaluate, and synthesize the meaning of information relevant to your particular area of study, in my case wireless and mobile, but also in my case really extending well beyond that to much of IT, lots of application areas, and really life, the universe, and everything. In cleaning out the office I discovered that much of what I use day in and day out to do my job really has very little value – desks, tables, chairs, paper clips, and even computers, which have become commoditized save for minor differences in operating systems. The only thing I have of value is information, embodied in all manner of media (although, following the Great Office Cleanup of 2010, much less of that in the form of paper) and the personal contacts, built up over our 20 years in business, required for access to the original sources of information that are way more important than the much-more-available derivatives, from news to second-hand analysis.
Mobility and its anytime/anywhere ethos has indeed delivered, to a great degree, the ability to duplicate desktop-class access to information – but therein lies the rub: desktop-class access to information, at least in the form of search, is now useless. We as a species are creating new data at a frightening pace; much of this, of course, is drivel and the ravings of those basking in the psychic rewards of their ability to post to Facebook and Twitter. Getting to real information suitable for analysis and as a source for insight and meaning is, perhaps surprisingly, getting more difficult due to (a) the fundamental limitations inherent in search technology, (b) the sheer volume of data noted above, and (c) anybody being able to post anything, regardless of correctness or value, and having such picked up by said search engines. And what about all that data that was created before the Web, as in all that paper I carted off? I had the terrible feeling that in tossing out magazines and brochures dating back in some cases 15 years or more I was in fact losing history and thus information that really can never be recovered, at least by me alone or in a reasonable amount of time. But if one has no way to store more information that one could regardless never find the time to (manually, mind you) search, what’s the point of history anyway?
This is, IMHO, our biggest challenge going forward, and, again, perhaps becoming thematic in 2011, at least for those who can tear themselves away from Twitter and Facebook for a few minutes. While I’m not really a fan of traditional libraries (again, for me, anyway, they are more akin to museums than storehouses of readily-usable information), the librarians working there could become significantly more valuable than ever as we seek access to what we need, wherever we might be and whenever we feel like it, with whatever electronic device we have at hand. A new industry in the making? Perhaps.
