For whatever reason I remembered a very good analogy late last night for explaining information management. It goes like this:

Think of the organisation as a library, which contains a great deal of written material. In a library, all of the written material, regardless if it is books, journals, newspapers, or ‘grey literature’ (newsletters, community papers), is catalogued electronically, using a structured form of metadata (title, author, publisher, date and so on). This is further supported by a classification scheme (usually Dewey) which contains a numeric reference.

The books themselves also all support the electronic metadata by having the physical defining characteristics about themselves (title, author, publisher, date and so on) quite clearly contained as part of the physical entity of the book itself. Most books in fact repeat these key characteristics on the front cover, spine of the book, and in the front couple of pages.

Now imagine this library (I have in my mind the old Stratford library on Water Lane in Newham where I once worked) without the covers on the books, without the books being filed on the shelves according to the Dewey classification scheme, without the additional retrieval and organising tool of the book catalogue. Without even peer review and the professional judgement of the book editors and book buyers who make decisions about i) what is published in the first place and ii) what makes it on to particular library shelves.

This latter scenario is much like many organisations. There is no editorial process as to what’s written and published (include emails and that becomes more than clear), there is very little metadata on anything and the metadata captured electronically is often wrong. There is no stable classification scheme that works at a top level (there still seems to be a lot of confusion in the local government community about the new IPSV - Integrated Public Sector Vocabularly).

This all assumes as well the heirarchies and ethnography of organisations doesn’t need to change. Creating more democratic organisational structures would change the information management dimension as well.