Any of these sound familiar?  Content management has become the bane of our business existence.  Supposedly we went from the pain of paper, to a paperless wonderland.  But all we really did was transfer the content hairball from one system to another.  And, when we find the latest and greatest tech tool, we continue to move the content hairball around.   We constantly move from one tool to another , never fixing the underlying structure of the problem…. Garbage in, garbage out!

 How do you get rid of the content hairball?   The reality is you can’t get rid of the content hairball until you do some detangling… something that cuts through the mess…  I call it Content Rationalization .   In other words, do some in-house organizing…. Any Home Organizer will tell you there are some simple steps to organizing your home.  I’ve converted these into simple steps for Content Rationalization for small or large content hairballs….

• Assess – Figure out what you have and where you have it
• Plan – Figure out what you want to have in the end
• Rationalize – Go through everything and organize it all into 3 buckets
  1. Keep
  2. Save for possible future use
  3. Get rid of it
• Organize – Based on what you want to have and what you want to keep, determine the right “system” (based on people, process and technology)
• Sustain – Develop a content management process that everyone can live with that prevents having to do major content rationalization again.

Content Rationalization is a buzzword for organizing your content and getting rid of the “noise” content in your company.  It’s not fun, and it’s not pretty, but you have to do it.  It’s a huge job when you leave it alone and don’t touch it for years.  But, if you invest up front time to do content rationalization and create an on-going process for content management – a cradle to grave process, then your business content landscape becomes much more tolerable and you start eliminating your content hairballs.  And, you won’t say… Why the hell can’t I find it?…

Wow.. This was probably written in 1991, published in 1992 and now 17 years later, we have so many examples of how this is playing out in our society.  “Open Source” code, “social networking”,  “transparency”  if you look at these “open systems” you can see how the information that flows  through these systems provides a steady stream of change, of continuous improvement. 

It seems interesting to me that there has been so much talk about “finding balance”, and really what we should be doing is constantly finding the imbalance in life.  It’s the change in life that makes us more and more vibrant, and provides greater opportunity.  Maybe the idea is to ebb and flow from one area of focus to another so that we can constantly integrate newness into what we are doing and who we are.

Nick Milton at Knoco, Ltd. Based in the UK, has a blog entry on this topic (We only learn when we don’t know what to do)   He provides a much more business oriented example of what it looks like to really keep disequilibrium in the system.  And, to Nick’s point of creating a “knowledge seeking” culture, rather than just a “knowledge sharing culture”…  I would suggest that for a company to stay agile in today’s marketplace, you need to ebb and flow between one and the other. 

Since starting my own business (thank you EDS (HP)) I have exposed myself to more new information and am living in a constant state of disequilibrium… and the reality is, I feel more alive and energized than I ever did in the last few years of my corporate career.  I am constantly moving from a knowledge seeking mode to a knowledge sharing mode.    

What’s your thought?  Find balance or imbalance in life?