I can certainly see some validity to the approach (if you want it done right, just do it yourself), but it is expensive and labour-intensive. It’s also not scalable at all. It results in creating another chain of command (the chain of harvesting?) that is required to identify, scrub, nominate, curate, bless and publish. So while it would possibly work, I feel philosophically (and economically) opposed to not letting people manage their own information.

Instead, I continue to toil away at figuring out how to make better systems and user experiences to encourage people to do it themselves. There are, of course, some indications out there in the world that certain tactics can result in taking ownership for managing your own information: hash tags on Twitter are a good example. So there’s hope.

At what point do we stop asking users to manage their own information (something they are not good at and have no interest in doing) and hire someone qualified to do it for them? (oops, I think my bias is showing…)

Yes, the business process has to aimed at, and completed by, the business users. But as you point out, it is a hard (impossible?) sell to get them to give a damn about search or records management. So rather than rely on them to supply that metadata (which is vital to the business even if nobody recognizes it), perhaps someone else has to step in to add the necessary information. Maybe this is what Ruven is suggesting could be done via workflows? Inferring metadata values based on other metadata values would be great, but as a colleague of mine keeps pointing out – “Nobody has invented “ESP.exe” yet.”

As you can tell, I am no expert and have no solutions to offer, just some comments to “stir the pot”.

Maybe just look through the literature to see whether anyone has developed a freely available domain ontology for your field. Then grab it and maintain and adapt it using any one of the various ontology management packages out there. (OK, that’s not nearly as trivial as that sentence makes it out to be!)

I don’t know the first thing about SharePoint, so I wouldn’t have any suggestions as to how to integrate this except “by hand”.

But this way, at least, you’re guaranteed metadata that’s formally consistent, and can be reasoned over.

I will take a look at your blog post; sounds like there are interesting connections to be made.

For me, the point was mainly to foreground the collection of metadata to support day-to-day business processes… and ideally, to try and collect _all_ metadata in this bucket, as I see the other buckets as a “hard sell” to users. Of course, how hard of a sell depends on the sophistication of your users. My point was that if we could fit our entire minimal term set into the “magic intersection” we would by definition no longer have to justify metadata to users at all because its value would be self-evident.

I realize of course that this is an ideal state and no project is ever likely to get there entirely. But that’s what I’d like to try and strive for because it solves several problems with a single approach.

Best,
Carsten

As I read this I was thinking about one of my current clients. They are the project and contract management practice department. They are accountable for improving the quality of how projects are managed and the contracts that underpin them. This is the world of policies, procedures, knowledge management, changing prevailing attitudes towards project delivery.

But they do not run projects themselves, and the organsiation has many different project delivery models, contract types and is geographically dispersed across all of Western Australia. To put it more bluntly, this is essentially a giant community of practice scenario.

Now in this scenario, when I apply your model, search tends to be an equal (or bigger) bubble than business process. Granted, the vast majority of scenarios are more like the situation you describe here are more transactional and process focused because ultimately its about getting shit done better than before.

So this led me to (re)thinking about my facets of collaboration model. http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2011/01/19/the-facets-of-collaboration-part-2enter-the-matrix/. That was an attempt to provide a better framing for collaborative scenarios and if I was to put a label onto the example you described here, I would argue that it was primary a task based scenario, incorporating transactional as well as knowledge work. But the scenario I describe is on the trait side of the fence.

So I wonder how your model would work with the facets model. Imagine “sizing” each bubble according to each quadrant?

regards

Paul

Just this week I had the opportunity to hear USAF Lt. Col. David Sanchez speak at SHARE 2012 in Atlanta about ‘weaponized SharePoint’. His metadata involves life & death decision making and protection of content vital to national security. The gist of his argument was that the metadata is crucial to the operation of the system, and that people are totally unreliable.

His solution is to leverage a lot of ‘out of the box’ policy and workflow functionality along with automated concept classification tools that automate the assignment of content types and associated metadata in ways that ensure compliance when combined with workflows.

This work is complex in his scenario due to the nature of the multiple dimensions of security and audiences that he has to deal with.

I think that we in the SharePoint community need to think hard about the ideas laid out here and validate (or refute) them, leading to an adjustment in the way we design and build our SharePoint solutions.

-Ruven

I have, but unfortunately I seem to recall that Canadians were excluded due to nebulous international licensing restrictions. Your site is US only, correct?

Best,
Carsten

Great piece. Wondering if you’ve visited our site? MP3s and FLAC (and you don’t need a special player).

Vince

It was also at a time when they were still operating far more independently from their then brand-new corporate parent.

I think a large part of the reason why their store appears a little convoluted is that it has evolved over a fairly long period, and is in desperate need of some from-the-ground-up re-engineering.