To folder or not to folder

Whenever I talk to customers they keep asking where can they see and create folders in DocuWare. Straight answer is: Well, you can not. But this does not help the discussion as it may get awkward. Most of customers will be perplexed and somehow lost. You might even hear: 

How come you do not have folders?

Sometimes I feel tempted to answer blatantly: Well we do not and guess what - I believe this is sexy. I am not there yet and this is how I normally address this challenge.

Dear customer you are not looking for a folder or file location. You are really looking for INFORMATION. It does not really matter where the information is, as long as you can retrieve it. Only the information, its content and context really matter to you.

Modern ECM solutions can give us similar experience as Google or any other search engine. You simply type in search criteria and get access to information. If you use Google in most of the cases you do not mind on which server the information is physically stored. Right? So extrapolate this on your document management system.

What matters is the INFORMATION and not the store path. Information, its content and context are crucial to the users.

Still I can understand that we are kind of addicted for the concept of folders. This is a habit, routine or experience. You can read more on the habits of the office workers in my last post. So the question arises who is to be thanked or blamed for hierarchical structures of folders? 

Steve and Bill are the godfathers of folder concept as we know it today. Which makes Xerox Star the stepmother – or the other way round.

Concept of computer folders was introduced in the 50’s of last century. This idea was adapted on most of modern OS and everyone today is familiar with the hierarchical structure of folders. If I remember the biography of Steve Jobs correctly he borrowed/copied the graphical folder metaphor from Xerox Star and Bill Gates just followed him. One could say that we can blame these two gentlemen for the blessing and curse of the folders structure. Because and thanks to them most of users are locked now in their mindset to the concept of folders as the only one proper way of storing, searching and indexing files. By the way Steve copied this idea at the beginning of 80's - more then 30 years ago but we still tend to believe that Folders are the sacred grail of information management. 30 YEARS+!!!

Folder name represents basically a metadata of a document

The major use case for a folder structure is to describe a document properties (indexes, attributes, metadata). A sales person might create following 3 level folder structure where 1st level represents Customer Name, 2nd level represents Project no. and 3rd level represents Document type.  In order to find a Proposal prepared for a customer DocuWare for project DE201509123 a sales person would browse through: DocuWare\DE201509123\Proposal\ and there she or he would expect to find the file. Makes a lot of sense right?

Now let’s imagine that we want to find Presentation for the same customer DocuWare for the same project DE201509123. We navigate again to the DocuWare\DE201509123 but there is no folder named Presentation. Then we click through other Project folders under DocuWare ex: DE201403023, DE201302001, DE201405783 etc. And we cannot find a presentation folder. Been there, done that and.... what do you next Dear Reader? 

I would most probably use search on Windows or Spotlight on wife's Mac. Would you do the same? 

Once we cannot find something in the sacred folder structure I suspect that most of us turn to search. Which proves that we search for INFORMATION and not for location of that information. 

Browsing through a folder structure is a custom that does not makes us more efficient. For most of the computer users it’s basically like Pavlov reflex.

We think that this is the proper and fastest way of finding the information. Unfortunately we all have very good but short memory and we tend to forget certain trivia. In most of the cases we do not remember in which folder we stored the document. Plus most of folder structures are not really consistent and sooner or later "controlled chaos" will spread out. But we remember certain aspects: for who the document was prepared, or when it was created or stored, which project it’s related too. Based on these properties (indexes, metadata, attributes) we fine tune our search and try to find this information. So again: once we open search on Windows or spotlight on Apple the location becomes less important than the access to information. Right? 

If you ask me if folder or not to folder - my answer is NO FOLDER at all. The future of Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Information Management is in Metadata. I believe that metadata driven solutions will thrive and customers leveraging metadata will benefit the most.