Digital documents won’t fix your problem. If your documents suck, so will their digital versions. Cultural change is the real transformation.

Recently, I published two articles on information management that went viral and attracted many comments:

The articles share my belief that sticking unstructured files into digital folders is not the latest and greatest way to manage digital information.

When do articles attract many comments? It’s typically when the content raises strong emotions, both supporting and opposing. In the case of the mentioned articles, many opposing voices took sides with the folder.

Let’s look at some of the comments.

1. The entire world is built on folders

One comment said that our entire world is built on the folders concept:

Our houses have a kitchen folder, a lounge folder, a bathroom folder, a garage folder, etc.

Our room folders have sub-folders like a frozen foods folder, a cold foods folder, a pantry folder, a socks folder, a dresses folder, etc.

Our cars have a folder for the engine, a folder for the fuel, a folder for the passengers, a folder for our cups, a folder for the car’s manual, etc.

We live in country, state, city, street folders.

We carry folders called bags and wallets, each with their own subfolders.

Our technology ensures our foldered lives are maintained.

So, why again do we want to get rid of folders for our documents? We can implement linked documents and tags without getting rid of folders.

This school of thought is heavily shaped by the material world. Physical objects cannot exist in two places at once. That’s a limitation in the material world, but not necessarily so in the digital world. Still, our thinking is deeply shaped by physical experience. The real challenge of digitization is to learn to think beyond those physical analogies.

2. Even the brain uses folders

Another comment argued that our brains also use folders to a certain degree:

The folders in our brains may be connected in various ways and to varying degrees, but we all have buckets of information that are more or less compartmentalized.

One way to depict those compartments? Folders.

It’s not about digitally choosing between folders only and strictly no folders. It’s good to have the option to work with folders and tags. Instead of having a file belong to one folder only, a tag allows a file to belong to multiple logical groups at the same time.

I would argue that this is how our brains work. We compartmentalize information, but we can associate information with multiple logical groups at the same time.

3. Not all information is structured

Another comment correctly identified that not all information is structured:

Modularization is great for documents such as operations manuals. However, breaking down documents into modules requires deep knowledge of the content and the original documents. Without a deep knowledge of the domain and insight into the underlying structure of the tasks and information, this tends to produce smaller and smaller modules and fragment knowledge to the point where it becomes less useful.

Then we have the problem of other documents that are not operational manuals, such as research papers. In this case, the overall flow of the document is required to properly understand the information.

When structuring knowledge into modules, subject matter knowledge is key. But knowledge is not enough; it also takes lots of effort and tenacity to convert unstructured information into structured information.

4. It’s just too complicated

One comment said:

This was beyond my pay grade of understanding. Far too technical. As you said, small steps, and I couldn’t figure out even a small step to try it out. I’m sure the mathematically advanced can figure this out, but for an average guy like me, I’m stuck with folders, as inefficient as they are (and they are).

This comment is honest, and it reflects what we see often at Yonder, a B2B SaaS company specializing in documentation software. Digitization of documents is complicated, especially when the source documents consist of both structured and unstructured documents. It takes knowledge, effort, and tenacity to achieve a fully digital documentation landscape.

Conclusion

The selection of comments shows beautifully that digitization is not as straightforward as people think. It requires a new way of thinking, which often requires cultural change. And we all know that cultural change takes time.

Last but not least, always remember this: 

If you digitize a shitty process, you will get a shitty digital process.

The same is true for digitizing documents: If you digitize a shitty document, you will get a shitty digital document.