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Corporate Memory Infrastructure Proposal

When I interviewed with Marble, one of the things which fascinated me most was the idea of a Corporate Memory Infrastructure. However, something like that is currently as good as nonexistent. Here are some thoughts how we could try to change this.

Current Situation

There have been attempts to change this. Reminders to encourage people to use the notes database were effective for about two weeks, then people stopped using it again. The project directory is not consistently used, people rather work locally. Even if a project has a proper entry in the projects directory, often not all working files are there. And even if that is the case, it is improbable that somebody else will ever find the useful information which is hidden there, because the only help to navigate are filenames.

Collaboration

The only effective tool for collaboration seems to be e-mail. I didn't really see a discussion in notes as I have in newsgroups, for instance (which essentially works like e-mail. In fact, in Netscape 4.0 e-mail and newsgroups reside in the same window!). For a while we had this excitement about ICQ, and I think most people have it still running, but I hardly ever use it.

staff@marble.com seems to work best.

The Web

During the past three years, I have seen the web changing from being a toy to being a tool. Why does e-mail work for collaboration? Because everybody has a mail client open, and everybody has the choice of his or her favorite client. The same applies to the web browser.

So the basic idea is to use the web browser for collaboration. The idea is not new. Intranets have been there for a while, and most Intranets have an Intranet web page. At SilverPlatter I recently saw how powerful this tool can be, when they gave us access to their Intranet website at inside.silverplatter.com.

I am wondering whether this technology could work for Marble as well, and this proposal should encourage people to discuss this.

All the difference: Push technology

There is still one thing missing: People have to be pushed all the time to use the system in the intended way. As far as I see it today, the best way to push people is to write them e-mails. For instance, if the overview document to a current project has not been updated for a while (say, 7 days), the owner of that document should receive an e-mail which asks her either to update the document, or to mark it as closed. If a new project is created and the user does not provide some basic information about the project, the user should receive a reminder, with a template document attached.

Roadmap for a Marble Intranet Site

Here is a list of issues, and how they could be resolved:

Accessibility

Marbles Intranet site should grant access through IP checking. If somebody tries to access it from outside, it should prompt for username and password. This will allow Marbles convenient access from the office and global access at the same time.
Everybody should have the Marble Intranet page as the default startup page.
There must not be a restriction on the format of the files in the individual directories. That would kill the whole thing! I personally don't like to use Lotus Notes, because the editor is a hassle. Jean-Marc says it is a pain to use FrontPage, as it is full of bugs and has problems with non-Frontpage files. We must not require people to convert files (e.g., in pdf), as nobody would have the discipline to do so (myself included). For viewing, I think it's fine that the browser will launch the appropriate application.

Colaboration

It should be possible to submit messages, which appear automatically on the startup page and disappear after a while (e.g., 7 days). Ideally, the submissions work over e-mail, as I guess that's a way to make people really use it. It should be discussed whether we even use staff@marble.com. Once the messages disappeared, they should be archived and be available through a search tool.
The spider, which regularly scans the project directory, should pick up newly created and updated documents and lists them in appropriate sub-pages. I could imagine that on the Intranet startpage, there are links to sub-pages like "What's New", "Recently changed", etc.
Following the pattern of the project directory (described below), an education dicretory and an information directory should be set up (maybe even more, how about an Affiliate directory, People directory, etc.). People should be encouraged not to throw away interesting electronic documents they find (e.g., an article on CNet. Instead, they put a copy (not a link!) of such an article in an appropriate directory. It would be picked up by an indexer and would from now on be available for search.
Ideally, just URLs would be submitted via e-mail. The system would automatically download the page, attach some information in html (e.g., who requested the download, timestamp, etc.) and put this in the info directory. A submission like this could also take place using an html form instead of e-mail.

Project Management

One of the most important information sources at Marble is the project directory. The directories in the project directory should be company directories (e.g., silverplatter). These company directories should contain one README file which describes the company and one subdirectory for each project. The structure of these company-project directories can be arbitrary, but it should also contain a README file which describes the project.
Regularly the project directory is scanned by a spider. The spider builds several project html-pages: E.g., "current projects", "all projects", "sorted by project name", "sorted by company name", etc.
Following a link would bring you to the project page, which could be generated automatically as well (reflecting the subdirectory structure and picking up README files, if they exist). Optionally an index page could be displayed instead, if it exists.
The described README files must contain a minimum of metadata. I picture it as a small number of required items in the form: "Company Name: SilverPlatter". This metadata is picked up by the spider. The rest of the file is treated as other information, which can easily be processed by the spider to build html pages.
We should have a search mechanism to search through the project directory. This could be realized as simple as using AltaVista, which processes several file formats and should be able to index all Microsoft documents, FrameMaker documents, etc.

Push

Some of the README files are really required. When one is missing, the user who created that directory, should receive an e-mail with a template document attached. It would actually be even better if the system would put the template document in the right place, and would put a link to that file in the e-mail message. Then the user could edit that file simply by clicking on the link. The computer would automatically start the users favorite text editor. (However, this might be problematic with mapped drives in Win95, as we cannot use http.)
Similar, if a mandatory entry is missing from a file, the user who created that file should receive an e-mail notification with detailed instructions of what is missing.
And, as mentioned above, as long as a project is not yet closed, the README (or some other) file should give a quick overview of the current status. It is the responsibility of the system to notify the owner of that file if it didn't change in a while.

I don't know how realistic these ideas are, nor whether Marble has the resources to implement some of them, but as we are knowledge workers, it is important to think about and discuss these issues. If these thoughts start discussions, they fulfilled their purpose.