LIKE 21: Information blackholes

What better way to spend your birthday than at a LIKE event?

And so it was that I spent the evening at The Crown Tavern on Clerkenwell Green at LIKE 21 participating in a discussion on Information blackholes.

The upstairs room at The Crown is a good venue for events like these. It shares many of the characteristics of The Wheatsheaf used by Big Ideas being heavily traditional with darkly coloured walls thick with pictures and other ephemera but it gains in being just that much bigger and having a mix of seating. This month it was the turn for us vegetarians to get the clutch of leather sofas.

The topic was introduced by Hanna Kazerani who regaled us with some horror stories from her career. The one that drew the most gasps was the UK company that was struggling to manage over 40 million documents which Hanna's analysis showed contained over 30 million duplicates. One does have to ask how an organisation could possibly think that it had produced 40 million documents let alone 40 million worth keeping.

The best bit of LIKE is the interaction between the people there and this was kicked-off with some questions set for each table.

Not precisely sure what we were asked, and it matters not in the slightest, but it set us off on a discussion on the interactions between IT (boo!) and IM (hooray!). The sadly all too familiar, and all too true, story was IT's decision to buy SharePoint and then appealing to IM to find out what yo do with it.

From an IM perspective, we covered concepts like Information Governance, Retention Policies, Classification/Taxonomy and Authentication. From this you could see how a conversation with IT could be possible as all of those concepts have their equivalent in the IT world.

But that just makes the main problem more obvious, neither IT or IM can talk easily to business where the key words are things like value, efficiency, profit and effectiveness.

The conversation developed from there, we spent quite a while talking about branding and logos for some reason, until the excellent food and the second drink slowed things down for a while.

Food dispatched, the mixing started and the conversations continued but without notebook to hand so I have to rely on a memory of croquet, Huddersfield, Rugby League, marathon running, London buses, commuting to Northampton and contract rates.

Another successful LIKE event that reminded us why we do this every month. LIKE is rather special.