Work Nouveau

Like an addiction to speed, dangerous pursuits, gambling etc., the current trend for sharing seems quite self destructive. Not that sharing in itself is a bad thing, far from it; but the processes and mechanisms needed are present in such abundance as to make recovery across the many channels needed, a real chore, like finding a soul-mate at a party where everyone is blindly reciting their life story.

In fact I would suggest we are perilously close to meltdown, with the real benefits of sharing being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of emails, feeds, blogs, postings, twitters etc.; like an indecisive man starving to death in a restaurant, or a decisive one having a Monty Python moment (Mr. Creosote in the Meaning of Life).

At various times in the past analogous situations have arisen. Originally the postal service carried real and meaningful communications and information. Friends, family, customers, suppliers, and the volume just grew to the point where a moderately busy individual could not find time, and finally junk mail (yes it did originally apply to snail mail), killed it. The secretary or PA was entrusted with the job of sorting the wheat from the chaff, and making sure only the important stuff got through.

Many people used to ridicule the managers who had their secretaries read their emails for them and were labelled technophobes. In fact they were just applying good information filtering as applied to letters and telephone calls. The PA wasn’t just a filter, they were a search engine too.

“Contact John Smith and find out who is the best expert to evaluate this, then get his cv and contract conditions, by tomorrow morning” -

Next morning “John Smith is away on vacation, but his PA said he uses Bill Jones – so I contacted him, and by the way he a weekend package that might be appropriate for your anniversary next month, when you have the time to look” etc.

Problem solved and a bit of serendipity thrown in.

If we substitute John Smith with all the different ways that information can be imparted, the size of the problem becomes apparent.

Someone somewhere has probably just discovered the piece of information I need, in a website somewhere. What are the chances of me finding it? I need it in the next couple of hours. Well let’s hit the traditional search engines. I find 2000 potential items, and the tenth one I open appears to have what I need, except the source is dated 2003 and I need a very recent source. Well lets look at my feeds, time is running out. I can check Delicious, Digg, and Twitter. I could spend time searching the tweets, following the links, searching the articles etc., but unless I was very lucky it would be a couple of hours wasted. I already spend almost 50% of my work time searching for information, if it goes much higher then my productive time will dimish rapidly.

What I want is the immediacy of Twitter, the depth of the search engine, the accumulated experiences within Delicious, the topicality of Digg, and a twist of serendipity.

In fact what I really want is a PA with a PhD in Business practice, a Masters in social sciences , and an Engineering degree in IT, the willingness to be paid a pittance and be able to make great coffee. Failing that a single interface that can handle my favourite topics, my favourite people, their favourite people, whilst providing me with element of discovery provided by social platforms.

Then perhaps I can get some work done, or just handle even more information.

Am I asking for too much?

Perhaps not.