Simply put, we aren’t managing content; we are hoarding stuff.
Stuff we think might have value, stuff we think we have to keep, and stuff we simply lost track of so long ago that we no longer know what it is. I have stuff like this in my inbox; you may have some of this stuff too. If you don’t, you don’t have to look very hard to find it. Maybe it’s in a shared drive; maybe it’s on your C: drive; maybe it’s still in a file cabinet; and maybe it’s already made its way into SharePoint.
There is a difference between the hoarder mentality and the picker mentality – and this can affect your organization. Hoarders keep stuff. Pickers ignore junk and seek out that which has value. If you watch the shows, you realize that hoarders don’t want to be pickers, they just want to keep stuff – ALL the stuff. For the most part in business, we aren’t dealing with the kind of hoarder whose stuff is about to bury them. We’re dealing with the people that the pickers find; the people with large warehouses, multiple outbuildings, or a fleet of abandoned school buses and RVs dotting their property. Hoarding doesn’t hurt them; it only hurts the generations that will inherit that stuff. That’s us; that’s business hoarding. We pile document after document, spreadsheet after spreadsheet, and PowerPoint presentations from everywhere into all the virtual outbuildings our network has to offer – and they never fill up!
To combat the hoarders, some of us have to become pickers, and some of us have to become family. As pickers, we have to ask questions like: “Where did you get this?” “How much do you think this is worth?” But, as family, we have to ask the really hard questions: “Why on Earth would anyone want this?” “What do you expect me (or my coworkers) to do with this?” Not to mention: “Don’t we have 10 or 20 of these? Do we really need this one too?”
As for becoming Pawn Stars, that’s the tricky part. One difference between Pickers and Pawn Stars is that Pawn Stars know how to repurpose stuff by turning it into more valuable stuff. They know that with the right amount of work, something interesting can become something truly remarkable. That’s the real goal. We have to find that content that has value, and we have to make the right investment to amplify that value and bring it to the surface.
Let me give you a short example: We have an engineering department that performs loss control inspections of the facilities we insure. We keep those inspection reports, all of them, forever. We have them on paper, on microfilm, on microfiche, in Word Perfect files, Word files, and PDFs. Up until a couple of years ago, nobody could access those reports without a guide and a Sherpa. Today, we have several years’ worth of those reports in SharePoint, easily accessible by facility, by insured, by engineer. Recently, we added a workflow, so engineers who are researching older reports can quickly add them to SharePoint and expand the library of “managed” reports. We still have to work on throwing away the other media, but I’m happy that we are extracting value from the pile.