David Weinberger has coined the term Digital Disorder in his recent book “Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder“. What a great expression! When I first heard that phrase, Digital Disorder, I said to myself, “I wish I had said that.”

At this time in history, everyone and their mother is trying to place some kind of grid over the disorder of information available on the web, on your hard drive, in your company, anywhere there is any amount of data that can’t be consumed in a single chunk. By placing such a succinct phrase on the information management mess we deal with, Weinberger has inadvertantly offered us a path to the solution of the problem.

Giving the beast a name makes it easier to create a mental image of this many headed hydra* of unstructured information. Every End User of SharePoint knows immediately what it means the first time they hear the phrase “Digital Disorder”.

I’ve found that using SharePoint helps tame the wild beast of Digital Disorder in critical ways. A lot of the mess we are in can be directly attributed to two shortcomings of the storage metaphor we have used for over fifteen years: namely the use of hierarchical file folders to store documents and the lack of metadata attached to those documents. SharePoint helps attack those shortcomings head-on.

Changing the paradigm for information structure is not as hard as you might think. I have seen complete file shares ported directly over to SharePoint, folder by folder, because that was the only way the users could envision the structure of the information. When shown how to structure the information within SharePoint libraries and then create a pseudo-structure through views, most people get the concept immediately. They still need the hand holding phase to get their own house in order, but the power of the concept goes a long way towards making the paradigm shift.

So, thank you David Weinberger for placing a name on the problems I deal with daily. Digital Disorder… what a great name.

* (Greek mythology) monster with nine heads; when struck off each head was replaced by two new ones;