Why waste time on categorization?
If you store your information in folders or on a network share or even in some document mangement systems then you may be at a disadvantage …
Filing behaviors such as tagging, categorization and placement within a hierarchy are a cost on your time and therefore a form of waste.
However, If the time to recall the item being stored is reduced by more than the cost of filing then it’s a worth while activity.
Hierarchical solutions to information storage have a high upfront investment in waste (the hierarchy itself), where as denormalized “broad and flat” solutions have a low initial investment in waste.
The reason that there is a swing towards the later solution is because modern search engines have a greater semantic understanding of the content and can recall faster, offloading the manual input needed by the operator onto a machine.
If you look to the future you will see that there is a massively increasing number of web based features for authoring and collaboration. These are either very low cost or GPL products. The idea that we would choose not to use this functionality and ignore efficiencies and cost reductions that it offers is unrealistic, the idea that a single supplier can meet the demand for all this new functionality is also unrealistic.
To have more business agility and lower costs a company must embrace a heterogeneous environment.
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