Despite over a decade in helping users understand information management and getting them to accept that shaping information in the way you need to use it can actually make them happier… it doesn’t matter. The only time I’ve ever seen users not default to a shared drive is if they are less than ten feet from a printer.
Applications have become richer in their functionality and what they can interoperate with to deliver ever more developed workflows and case management. There are tools which provide an entire platform that can let you do just about anything with information, from web publishing to day-to-day processing.
Still it doesn’t matter; shared drives trump everything, all the time, everywhere in the world. This blog post isn’t big enough to explore all the reasons why users do this (and there are many). But what I do have space for is this; two challenges – one for us and one for developers.
Challenge 1 – Us
Turning off the shared drive! 1 I mean the complete shut down of the NTFS – no corporate drive and no user drives… nothing. Could it be done without risking information management and digital continuity? Would users spontaneously combust?
A lot of it would rest on what comes next. I believe one of the reasons new products struggle is that they don’t move away from the same ‘view’ as Windows Explorer. That’s not a criticism of MS Windows – it’s clearly very successful. But if the next application borrows so significantly from the ‘left-hand pane for browsing and right-hand pane for selecting’ users probably don’t see why this new system really might be better for them.
Challenge 2 – Developers
Developers can make something that works, but that doesn’t mirror patterns or behaviour in a shared drive environment. 2 Most of them reading this will already be telling themselves that they are totally different… but they really aren’t.
Part of this is some inescapable function like dragging and dropping objects across different applications. And there’s no getting away from its facility. What I mean is the whole interface and way of interacting with information that is useful, and users favour it over a shared drive.
I’d be happy to hear from either camp as to what you’ve learnt and would like to see in the future…. We can’t accept adverts for tools on this blog – but if you email us we’ll have a look.
Do you think you could explain the terms for those of us who are not IT experts as I didn’t know what NTFS meant.
Hi David
Thanks for that – we often forget about the acronyms so apologies!
NTFS means “New Technology File System” which is a long name for Microsoft Window’s proprietary folder system that most people have on their home computers (your My Documents area).
When working in a coporate environment, I’ve always found the challenge was to get people to USE shared areas, instead of having a little system of their own that only they understood, on a personal drive. So I don’t understand this either! What’s the problem with shared drives? Far better recognition that information is a corporate resource and has to be organised in a way that is transparent to others.
Hi Maggie
Thanks for the comment. I think that’s the issue we all face – getting others to use anything outside of their own location is tough challenge – I have another blog here http://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/the-13th-task-of-hercules-email-management/
It’s based on email management but the ideas apply to any information that the business needs to see!
We tend to use a shared drive for documents that aren’t finished – they need more work, research, collaboration, proofreading etc, and the options in our edrms are clumsy requiring that every draft, however slight the changes, is preserved (storage is not free). Shared drive is much more flexible, and finished documents then are stored in the edrms. The shared drive is particularly useful for large lists (which can be over 10,000 items and take weeks to edit in amongst other work).
Hi Wendy
Your organisation’s approach is not an uncommon one, and as long as everyone understands the rules it only needs to be clear to your information management people that you have a federated approach to managing information (that’s documents in one place and records in another).
A top tip though if you’re covered by the Freedom of Information Act though is that it doesn’t matter where the information is stored or whether your organisation thinks of it as a final record, if you hold the information irrespective of location it would have to be reviewed under an infroamtion request. For that reason it’s important your FOI Team understand not only the edrms but also the shared drives.
The software development world has gone through a number of versions of this. That world is worth looking at because software development is very much like collaborative document creation (which is what civil servants in central government do a lot of) and because these tools were written by the very people who used them. First, we used networked file systems (“aka shared drives”); then, a couple of decades ago, we moved to version control systems like cvs or, latterly, subversion. The present solution to collaborative document creation is distributed revision control. See especially git or mercurial. These tools are a step change improvement, light-years away from shared drives. (Also, I can tell you, from personal experience, what happens if IT shut off the shared drives: what happens is that everyone emails around multiple versions of Word documents with track-changes turned on.)
Hi James
Thanks for the comment. There are many industries where systems for version control work brilliantly as you’ve described. The issue with collaboration in many parts of the pbulic sector, and indeed the wider world is we’re dealing with versioning ideas and not straight updates to preferred code and text.
In this world it can be hard to keep track of everything so maybe adoption of stricter environments could help.
Thanks again for reading our blogs.