CTO Articles
Published in IT World
February 6, 2007
The Whac-A-Mole approach to information management
Some time ago - actually quite some time ago - the amount of information that your average knowledge worker is expected to keep track of, disappeared over the horizon into the Land of Impossible Things. Over there it lives side-by-side with other famously impossible things such as:
- getting a plumber on a weekend
- getting the numbering of nested lists to work correctly in a modern word processor
- playing guitar with a spoon held in your mouth
Actually, zap that last one. It turns out it is possible after all [1].
An important and clever trick has evolved - and continues to evolve - to help us deal with this Impossible Thing. We do it naturally, without even thinking about it. The fact that it comes naturally does not make it any less remarkable. In fact, it makes it even more remarkable.
I speak of the process of monitoring for change. How do you play Whac-A-Mole? You scan all the moles at a high level, not paying attention to any one Mole in particular. Instead you monitor for Mole state change. When a Mole changes state - BAM! - you whack it.
We have learned to take this Whac-A-Mole approach to a lot of information management tasks. You may have an uncountable number of stock items to track, but the number that change state from day-to-day is a much smaller number. You may be in charge of an uncountable number of financial instruments to track but the number that fluctuate in price from session-to-session is a much smaller number. The mantra is this: do not try to watch everything. It is impossible. Watch what changes instead.
Word processors tend to have change control features which are, I think, one of the earliest widely deployed Whac-A-Mole strategies for digital information. A contract may have 500 pages but how many pages actually changed since you last read it? I don't know about you but I could not live without document change control.
Stepping up a level from individual documents, RSS/Atom [2] provide Whac-A-Mole facilities for changes to Websites. Like "track changes" in word processors, I believe we will soon ask ourselves how we ever managed before we had RSS/Atom.
Stepping sideways now for a moment, the amount of information your average IT shop cares for day-to-day has long since past the point where you could just take a complete backup when you felt like it. Whac-A-Mole to the rescue again with data synchronization tools that only copy information that has changed since the last copy was made.
Taking another turn sideways into software development and Whac-A-Mole pops up again. These days, change-based software management tools such as Subversion [3] are a critical part of the software development toolset.
Curiously (or perhaps I'm just ill-informed) this otherwise pervasive change-based management strategy doesn't apply to spreadsheets. I find that distinctly odd...
Oh well. Perhaps I should be glad that my nascent rule has found the all important exception that proves it true.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PECpA9a_2zQ
[2] http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.shtml
[3] http://www.subversion.tigris.org