Folders are dead. Learn a modern, modular approach to digital information management and how to combat information overload.

In the good old times, a document was in a folder, or it wasn’t. “It’s in the blue folder in the cabinet behind my desk”.

Offices were lined with folders. Moving offices was sweaty work. My first summer job was to move folders from one office building to another.

That was in 1997.

Enter digital information management. With all the changes that came along with it, somehow the folder survived. This has made it easier to move your office — just take your laptop, leave the old office, go to the new office, and continue working.

That might seem like an advantage, but digital folders introduced huge disadvantages. Why? Nothing illustrates the digital document journey and its challenges better than the folder.

Let’s start from the beginning.

Digital Information Management 1.0

Paper documentation was phased out in many use cases 10–20 years ago. However, it was replaced by Digital Information Management 1.0 — replacing paper by PDFs or OneNote.

Example 1: Aviation

In aviation, paper operation manuals were replaced by PDFs on a laptop. The only advantage was the weight reduction, which translates directly into lower fuel consumption. Every kilogram you fly from Zurich to New York uses 1/4 kilogram of fuel — no matter if it’s one kilogram of payload, aircraft, fuel, or operations manuals.

This is how operations manuals looked like at the turn of the century:

Example 2: Personal Notes

In personal information management, replacing paper often meant replacing the beloved Moleskine notebook with OneNote:

Likewise, the only advantage was weight reduction, plus the very limited search functionality in OneNote. No longer would you search frenetically in your Moleskine notebook when you have last met with the person you’re talking to right now — only to find out that those notes are in the previous Moleskine notebook (which sits at home on the bookshelf).

Getting from 1.0 to 2.0

Let’s face it, Digital Information Management 1.0 as described above barely helps to manage information. It just facilitated the move away from paper, but it is a long way from using the full potential of digital information management.

And the folder stayed, albeit in an electronic form.

Because blasting out PDFs is dirt cheap, Digital Information Management 1.0 has led to a surge in information overflow: Because it’s easy and cheap, organizations don’t think too much about what information might be useful for which user group — they just blast it out. This feeds the vicious information overflow circle, leading to two dangerous habits:

• End users ignore information they get from their organizations because it is either irrelevant or simply too much to read anyway
• End users start summarizing and duplicating information that they deem important. Organizations have no control over summaries and duplicates.

When I started being involved in digital information management in the airline industry some 15 years ago, we would throw some 1’500 PDF documents at our crews, with some of these documents being well over 100 pages long. To make things worse, we updated those documents regularly. So every time the crews received an update, they complained about the (missing) relevance for their daily work, the efforts to find the changes within the document, and the sync times to receive the new documents on their devices.

As an active reserve officer in the Swiss Armed Forces, I have the same challenges as the mentioned airline crews: I still get paper documents delivered to my mailbox — field manuals, new regulations, and technical information. All these documents are also available as PDFs, 2’400 documents with a total of 150’000 pages. How on earth should I read all this information, or decide what is relevant for my role?

In personal information management, information overload is mostly generated by the individuals themselves. How many times have you written down something during a meeting, just to be sure that you won’t forget? How often have you been able to retrieve the written-down information at the right moment?

Digital Information Management 2.0

How do we get out of the information overload trap, or in more technical words, from Digital Information Management 1.0 to 2.0?

From my experience, there are two key concepts for Digital Information Management 2.0: A modular approach, and using the power of the link.

Modular Approach

Modularization means breaking down documents and pages into granular blocks, or modules. Therefore, a document or a page is just a collection of modules. Nevertheless, a collection of modules can be displayed to resemble pages — albeit those “pages” might have different lengths.

A modular approach has the following advantages:

• Modular documents are filtered to show only essential parts of a document for a specific use case. Filtering happens dynamically, by selecting one or multiple tags. This is how context is created, and information overflow is reduced.
• Modular documents are searched just like legacy PDF documents, but search results can be filtered using the same tags as described above to narrow down search results for a specific use case.
• Instead of creating duplicates of the same information in multiple documents, modules are reused across multiple documents. In this way, updating the information in one place automatically updates the information everywhere — either immediately upon update or after the relevant authority or department has approved the update in the workflow.
• Change management happens on the modular level, directly in the context of the digital document — no more emails saying “Please change the second paragraph on page 53.” Once a change request is entered directly on the affected module in the workflow, all pre-consultation, approval, and editing work can be done directly on the module. Once published, old and new versions of a module can be displayed to the end users side-by-side, and different user groups can be notified only about changes that are relevant to their work.

The Power of the Link

In Digital Information Management 2.0, each module is linked to other modules. That’s how context is created, and the illusion of pages and documents is presented to end users.

Remember the folder? While the relationship between document and folder was 1-to-1 in the paper days, the relationship between digital documents is now many-to-many: Each module can contain hyperlinks to many other modules, irrespective of what folder they are stored in.

Here is my thesis: folders are too rigid in a digital, hyperlinked, modular information landscape. Typically, folders are nested, and you need to know exactly how to navigate to that sub-sub-sub-folder to find the required piece of information.

What can you do? Use tags instead. You can still display tags hierarchically in a way that they resemble folders.

The best example of this is Gmail. Whilst you might think that your emails are organized in folders, they are tagged, with the tags being displayed hierarchically. This has the great advantage that you can tag each email with as many tags as you want, and you will still find it under all of the tags-displayed-as-folders.

Creating a folder or tag hierarchy is a recipe for disaster. It won’t take long before you confuse yourself and don’t find your information anymore. The quick cures are shortcuts on your desktop, duplicating information, or asking your intern to reorganize the folder structure on the file server.

Instead of using folders or hierarchical tags, use flat tag clouds. To give structure and filter possibilities, just apply multiple tags to each piece of information.

There are many more use cases for links in digital information management, especially when links are configured to trigger actions when the link source or the link target changes:

• Changes in rules, laws, and norms trigger change requests in your company documentation: Instead of passing an Excel list with all the changes to your compliance team, the compliance team is notified automatically about the modules requiring updates due to changes in rules, laws, and norms.
• In a multi-language environment, documents tend to become inconsistent over time, as updates in the different languages aren’t performed by the same teams. Just like for changes in rules, laws, and norms, a change in the master language of a document can automatically trigger a change request on the corresponding module in dependent languages.
• A user’s favorites and the list of changes are just collections of links, presented to the user in an actionable way.

Practical Hints

From my experience, “big bang” doesn’t work when migrating from Digital Information Management 1.0 to 2.0. Going step-by-step is a much more promising approach to transforming information management. You should spend enough time and thought on the concepts before starting the journey:

What tags will you need? How large or small shall your modules be? What’s the most efficient workflow to handle change requests? What user groups exist today, and will they change in the future?

All these questions should be answered thoroughly and if needed with help from an experienced specialist — if those questions remain unanswered, the introduction of any new information management software will end in chaos and dysfunction.

Last but not least, digitization is a means, not an end. So, therefore, when migrating from Digital Information Management 1.0 to 2.0, make sure you don’t lose your team.

While a consumer decides for just him- or herself if a certain note-taking tool is compelling, large organizations procure information management tools for many people. And there are always some employees who don’t like change. There are also always employees who cannot follow the rapid change anymore. Both types of people are part of your organization, so make sure you don’t leave them behind.