The social life of information

Have you ever thought what was going to be the social life of an email you wrote? Or a project memo? Or a power point presentation?

I continue to be absorbed by this idea of companies as information creators and consumers and the way they manage the value chain of their information. As one continues to observe how large organizations manage it, one comes to the conclusion that there are several types of information assets in every organization (obvious) and that a good way to analyse them is to think about what I would call their social life (not so obvious). No, I don't mean the way this is treated in the famous book by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid.

Think about the different types of information that exist in your organization: think of bills, invoices, HR resumes, financial reports, customer correspondence, internal project information, investors information,... You can think of all your type of information simply analysing which are going to be the interactions that it's going to have in its lifetime. For example, the accounts payable department is going to be dealing with invoices for a while, and afterwards forget them and archive in some place where they can find them later if needed. You can think that an invoice has a very limited social life: some interactions in a short period of time, and always with the same people. The piece of information will not change: everyone would be able to say that it's the same before and after the experience.

On the contrary, think about the life of the design document of a complex engineering piece. You can probably see it interacting with numerous people, some recurrent, some new, always adding something, always evolving. People would think that this piece of information has changed, it is not the same from the beginning. And herein, exactly lies the complexity.

Because, it is a different piece for different people, everyone would call it differently. That's one of the reasons why in your corporate search system it is so difficult to find things. Because you describe it with words that are very different from the words that others used when they stored it.

When talking about Information Management or the Life Cycle of Information, one should consider this question: what is going to be the social life of this piece of information? And accordingly design the mechanism that will increase it's findability when needed.

This is something I'm working on because I firmly believe that the creation of wealth is going to be increasingly dependent on our ability to create information that is valuable and on our ability to access the information that is valuable for us.