Pandemic in the Verbosphere

{I'm honored to be invited as a guest blogger by my good friend Carlos, and hope that my contributions will be worthy of the Leyva-man and his Web-Tones.}

I remember hearing the results of one of those studies a few years ago that measures worker productivity. It found that the time it takes to write a business letter had actually increased compared to with the same study done in the early 80s. Of course the natural reaction is: “How can that be?: It seems implausible that a letter written using Microsoft Word with cut, copy, paste, delete, and all of the other capabilities could take longer than one written using an IBM Selectric, carbon paper, and Wite-Out. The study also found the reason: the average letter was now revised 6.5 times as opposed to a couple of times back in the day.

The volume of written communication – the “Verbosphere” if you will - is out of control. Some companies may include the avian influenza pandemic as a possible concern in disaster planning, but all companies of any size must include the document proliferation pandemic as part of their operational planning, especially in “paper” heavy industries like Law (Carlos’ space) and Real Estate (my space).

This disease affects businesses at every level. If the biggest challenge of an operations manager in the 70s and 80s was to keep his accounting and POS platforms up, the 21^st century’s biggest challenge has got to be email. (I know at our company, the disaster recovery time frame for email is far more aggressive than for accounting). If the greatest fear a company has is an IRS audit, then I would contend a close second (and perhaps greater at some companies) would be a legal discovery involving communication by multiple users, at multiple offices, over an extended time period. And going back to the illustration about the business letter, one of the great robbers of office efficiency has got to be the time it takes to find the relevant communication on a given topic. In a March 2005 study by Microsoft on office efficiency, Dr. Larry Baker wrote "In my three decades of studying what makes workers productive, I've found the most crucial skills are their ability to efficiently communicate across all kinds of boundaries, share important documents and manage the increasing volumes of information."

I believe the key to finding a vaccination for this disease that is growing asymptotically is in developing fully integrated solutions. First the technology must be integrated. Dealing with email, document management, and collaboration as separate platforms only addresses half the problem. Sure, I may implement a vaulting solution to deal with the fact that my email volume doubles every year, but why is it doubling? Is it because my teams are collaborating via email? By sending revisions back and forth to multiple people rather than creating the document in Sharepoint or a Wiki and developing it there? Likewise, I may deploy a document management solution for all of my contracts, leases, and financials, but if the security lacks the granularity or business logic to accommodate how the documents are shared in real life, I will still have people attaching pdfs to emails, rather than pointing intended recipients to the DMS platform.

Which leads to my second point: The business process needs to be integrated. All of the steps, from how and where documents are created, edited, and approved, to what format they are created in, to how they are disseminated, both internally and externally, need to be considered when developing a solution.

If our technology does not match the process, and what our end users need to do is not a click or two away, they will seek the path of least resistance, circumvent the system, and revert to their primordial ways: email.

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I wish I could write that I have an instant cure for this. I don’t. Just like developing a vaccine for a virus that constantly mutates, the cure is going to vary between industries and companies. I do think MS Sharepoint 2007 holds some real promise, especially with the degree it integrates with Word. I also know that a key is going to be to develop good document hygiene practices and training our people to use them. Users are going to have to rethink how they communicate and collaborate.

I believe we mastered dealing with large volumes of numerical data in the 20^th century. The real challenges of the Verbosphere still lay ahead. - Chris Saah