Realities of electronic information management

Picture the scene. It is your first day in a brand new job. Your role is
that of information architect in a company with lots and lots of
information that needs managing. You have a sizeable budget, enough
people and (bliss!) board-level backing to take a green field approach
to implementing an EIM infrastructure.

At the start of the week you are understandably pumped, psyched and
ready to blaze a trail in your new role. You take a look at the
information assets that need to be managed. You build a conceptual
model of the information universe. You harden that model into a
collection of information structures. You further harden them by
selecting products/tools that support your chosen information
structures. You get all that done by Friday and head home for the
weekend, breezing through reception leaving an odor of supreme
confidence in your wake. You put you best sunglasses on and climb into
the company car. You tap the steering wheel to the beat of your favorite
music. Life is so good.

It's important to enjoy such experience when they come your way as they
are few and far between and, in my experience, they last one week on
average. From there, things can get real messy, real fast. Welcome to
the world of information management.

In the full flush of irrational exuberance that typically accompanies
the early stage of information management projects, effort centers
around picking the perfect structure for the information assets and the
workflows they traverse. Roughly speaking, there are three choices:

1) Put the information into a linked set of tabular structures - the
database approach.
2) Put the information into a linked set of hierarchical structure - the
XML approach.
3) Put the information into a linked set of freeform documents - the web
pages, word processor approach.

Unless you are very lucky, you will not be long into this exercise
before you find that none of the above are perfect for your needs. In
fact, if your experiences mirror mine, you will find that the closer you
look, the more exceptions you come across. Exceptions that add more
warts to your information model. Over time, the pristine edifice you had
in your head at the end of that first Friday, has metamorphosed into a
more carbuncular structure. A structure adorned with compromises and
"temporary" fixes.

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