I've been stewing on this one for a week now: I'll start an example. When Netflix had trouble with its shipping centers, what could it do? What did it do?
Many businesses knee-jerk and feel obligated to hide problems from customers (or more importantly, shareholders) rather than shake their confidence. Not with Netflix. The truth was out there, and they were ready to apply a 15% credit to accounts at a loss to the company of $3 million. So what happened to Netflix shares when this information got out? Did they drop? Nope.
Imagine if they tried to conceal the information. In the information age, with unofficial blogs like Hacking Netflix, what would speculation have done to share prices? Maybe it would have taken a dive similar to the Apple shares when investors speculated over Steve Jobs' health.
So this brings me to my thought for the week. The Internet is a free place (at least until Net Neutrality is utterly obliterated, anyway). As long as it is free, you may be able to control the information on your site, but you will have very little success getting a grip on what everyone else on the Internet is doing. Just ask Steve Jobs (the fake one, not the one mentioned above). Just ask WikiLeaks. Just ask the Internet Archive, the EFF, and the FBI.
Our systems of information control (intranet knowledge bases, secret Excel files and Word files on a shared drive, or the manual that the one staff assistant who has worked in the department for twenty years keeps at his/her desk, etc.) may have worked 15, 10, or even 5 years ago. Things could be locked down and controlled. Whispers and rumors of alternate information only went as far as cubes and copy machines.
In the bad old days, if your knowledge base did not meet user needs, they might not use it. Today in the Web 2.0 world, if it does not meet their needs, they will make something else. (Psst. If you haven't already, now's the time to read my previous post on Death by Committee; Contraception by Silo.)
Do you see the dramatic irony here? In the attempt to lock down and control information to keep it pure and accurate, we create a situation where users go elsewhere, make duplicates that are no longer under control and can longer be updated, accurate, or blessed by the central authority.
Wouldn't a Wikipedia model make much more sense? You could allow your community to contribute to the knowledge base, but re-purpose your gatekeepers as reviewers of the contributions. Instead of having to keep up with the authoring and updating and becoming bottlenecks of all the documentation, they can delegate to the community and become reviewers of this work.
As a testament to our walled-off departmental-units, we fortify our documentation in all its monolithic grandeur to stand rock-solid and unchanged by rival city-states (or departments). In the meantime, we could be could be using Wikis and other collaborative tools to transcend the walls erected by physical location, department, and job title to get some work done. The metaphor, of course, is much better when Victor Hugo used it for another game-changing technology for one of my favorite chapters of The Hunchback of Notre Dame:
...everything changes. Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only more durable and more resisting than architecture, but still more simple and easy. Architecture is dethroned. Gutenberg's letters of lead are about to supersede Orpheus's letters of stone...
In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, irresistible, indestructible. It is mingled with the air. In the days of architecture it made a mountain of itself, and took powerful possession of a century and a place. Now it converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself to the four winds, and occupies all points of air and space at once...
A book is so soon made, costs so little, and can go so far! How can it surprise us that all human thought flows in this channel? ... But architecture will no longer be the social art, the collective art, the dominating art...
The press, that giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the intellectual sap of society, belches forth without pause fresh materials for its work. The whole human race is on the scaffoldings. Each mind is a mason. The humblest fills his hole, or places his stone.
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