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I’m giving myself a Memorial Day break. I didn’t post anything yesterday, and today is a re-run, from, as the Beatles might have sung, 20 years ago today.

It’s a bit esoteric, but even more relevant today than when I first wrote it.

Take a look and let me know what you think about it.

– Bob

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If there’s one certainty in our business, it’s that useful, lightweight frameworks turn into bloated, productivity-destroying methodologies.

And so it was with considerable trepidation last week that I suggested we need another methodology, to do for Content Management Systems (CMSs — the technologies we use to manage unstructured information) what normalization and related techniques do for relational database management systems (“Unstructured data design — the missing methodology,” KJR, 5/17/2010).

But we do. As evidence, I offer many of the comments and e-mails I received suggesting we don’t: Most pointed to the existence of well-developed tools that allow us to attach metadata to “unstructured content objects” (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, digital photos, videos and such, which we might as well acronymize now and have done with it: For our purposes they’re now officially “UCOs”).

And many more pointing out that search obviates the need for categorization.

Let’s handle search first, because it’s easier: Search is Google listing 16,345,321,568 UCOs that might have what you’re looking for. It’s also what leads to (for example) searches for “globe,” “sphere,” “orb,” and “ball” yielding entirely different results.

Search is what you do when you don’t have useful categories.

And then there’s metadata — the subject that proves we don’t have what we need. Because while we have the ability to attach metadata to UCOs, we have only ad hoc methods for deciding what that metadata should be.

Some readers suggested this might be a solved problem. Books are UCOs, and librarians have been categorizing them for centuries. Between the Dewey Decimal System and the Library of Congress Classification, surely there’s a sound basis on which to build.

Maybe there is. I’m skeptical but not knowledgeable enough to state with confidence they won’t work. I’m skeptical because their primary purpose is to place books in known locations in the library so they can be readily found, which means they’re probably similar to the single folder trees we need to move beyond.

What we need, that is, is the ability to place one UCO in as many different locations as anyone might logically expect to find it. To use one of my own books as an example, Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World would fit in at least these categories: Leadership, Information Technology, Staffing, Decision-making, Motivation, Culture change, and Communication skills.

The official name for the discipline of defining knowledge domains … what we’re trying to do … is ontology. It’s an active area of development, including the creation of standards (such as OWL, which puzzlingly stands for “Web Ontology Language” instead of “Ontology Web Language,” but let it pass).

From what I’ve been able to determine, though, it appears everything being developed thus far falls under the heading of tools, with a useful methodology nowhere in sight. This is, perhaps, unsurprising as it appears philosophers have been discussing the subject at least since Aristotle first introduced it 2,350 years ago or so, without yet arriving at a consensus.

It could be awhile.

Of course, philosophers are obliged to develop systems so universal they apply, not only to our universe, but to all possible universes. Such is the nature of universal truth.

We don’t need to be quite so ambitious. We merely need to categorize information about our businesses. To get the ball rolling, I’ll offer up the framework we’ve synthesized at IT Catalysts. It enumerates ten topics that together completely describe any business — five internal and five external. They are:

Internal

  • People: The individual human beings who staff a business.
  • Processes: How people do their work.
  • Technologies: The tools people use to perform the roles they play in business processes.
  • Structure: Organizational structures, facilities, governance, accounting, and compensation — how the business is put together and interconnected.
  • Culture: The learned behavior people exhibit in response to their environment, and the shared attitudes that underlie it.

External

  • Products: Whatever the business sells to generate profitable revenue.
  • Customers: Whoever makes or influences buying decisions about the products a business sells.
  • Pricing: What the business charges for its products, terms and conditions of purchase, and the underlying principles that lead to them.
  • Marketplace: The business “ecosystem” in which the company exists, including customer groupings, competitors, partners, and suppliers.
  • Messages: How and what the business communicates with its marketplace.

There you go — a free gift, if you’ll forgive the redundancy. Just break these topics down into sub-topics and sub-sub-topics. The result should be a workable classification scheme.

Let me know when you’re done.

The Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States — our two most important founding documents — are remarkably secular. Rebukes to English governance, which claimed its legitimacy from God through the divine right of kings, they state with complete clarity that the legitimacy of governments is obtained, not from Heaven, but from the consent of the governed.

The words are clear and accessible to anyone who is at all literate and has the patience to read them. That this was the consensus of this nation’s founders is not in serious doubt.

Also not in serious doubt is the respect our nation’s founders had for consensus itself, perhaps because it is the purest form of the governed’s consent. In each case they spent a very long time discussing and debating what they should think and how that thinking should be expressed; also in each case, different factions compromised to reach the final decisions. Both documents were results with which each group and faction might not completely agree, but to which they could and did completely commit.

It’s become popular to consider the Constitution’s framers as selfish, wealthy, racist landowners interested solely in preserving their status. But this oversimplifies the complexity of their circumstances. When they led the Revolutionary War, they had quite literally risked their lives and fortunes to gain independence from England. Their sincerity of purpose in creating a resilient nation seems more likely than otherwise.

As for slavery, it is beyond doubt that many of the framers abhorred it (many with more moral courage than, for example, Jefferson, who abhorred slavery in principle but not so strongly as to suffer the personal inconveniences to be experienced from its elimination). The Constitution’s allowance of slavery demonstrates the nature of consensus better than any of its other features: Even those who hated it the most valued preservation of the nation even more. They understood, perfectly, the need to give way on some points — even those held very strongly — to achieve the larger result.

Consensus is falling out of fashion in leadership circles these days, and we’re the poorer for it. Three reasons seem to dominate this shift, all the result of too-limited understanding of the subject:

  • Wrong definition: Consensus is the form of decision-making in which a group might not fully agree with the final decision, but does commit to the final decision specifically because it is the decision of the group. It is not what some detractors call consensus — a process in which a group argues until it gives lip service to a decision which those who approve adhere to and those who don’t feel free to ignore.
  • Wrong priority: Achieving consensus is not a quick process. To those who participated, the Constitutional Convention seemed eternal; it did, in fact, require almost four months.Consensus is the wrong process to be used when speed is essential. Conversely, speed is sometimes the wrong priority for leaders to choose — there are many times when commitment is more important than velocity. In business, excessive speed can lead to undesirable results, among them “leaders” who leave those who are supposed to be following too far behind them; and leaders able to win every battle while fighting the wrong war.Metaphorically speaking.
  • Wrong technique: Voting is the process where everyone argues, and then tallies up preferences so that the majority wins and the rest lose. Consensus requires an expectation that everyone involved has to give way on some points. It also requires that all concerned do more than allow others to speak while they formulate their rebuttals. It requires actual listening — working to understand the other person’s point of view. That, in turn requires patience, an art practiced extensively by those who participated in our nation’s founding, as the prevalent style of speaking at the time was both windier and more formal than what we practice today.

In general, consensus results in more commitment, but to a relatively poor quality result. Because consensus requires compromise, this generality can’t be entirely avoided. But listening — recognizing that others have wisdom as well — can offset the effects of compromise, making the final result better than what any single individual can achieve.

It’s been said that no committee ever painted the Mona Lisa. That is, of course, true. It’s also true, though, that it was a committee that wrote the Constitution of the United States — a document that is, in its own way, as much a work of art as anything ever created.