Will your Live Mesh be a live mess?

Unless your organization has a human-friendly filing system, new file-sharing technologies (like Live Mesh and those that follow) may only complicate your network.
(This post also appears in print in the Lafayette Business Journal)

Even today, I can almost hear my mother’s voice when my room looks messy, reminding me to keep things at least relatively orderly. When I went to college it became more complicated. Cleaning my mess never stopped my roommate from cluttering up the joint or rearranging whatever order I managed to achieve.

Some of my friends had several roommates. With five or six people in one house, the mess never ended. It moved and rearranged and seemed to grow organically (count the dirty clothes and dishes and it was very organic). The mess was alive.

The business equivalent to this dorm-room disaster is the shared drive.
We’ve got designated areas (our room) and shared areas (the living room) that each have enormous potential for clutter. Similar to closing the door to our bedroom, we can keep others from seeing the mess on our hard drive. The shared living areas, however, can be pretty difficult to reign in. At some point, critical mess is reached. The drives fill. That’s when an IT guy (or gal) throws down the mouse and yells like mom, “Go clean your drive!”

To make matters worse, the search tool whispers like a dust-bunny-devil on your shoulder, “Pssst, just drop that file anywhere. I’ll help you find it later.” I can almost hear a whispered laugh as the lost puppy icon runs in circles, fetching file after lost file.

Let’s face it, throwing our files on a shared drive and relying on the search feature is equal to keeping our clothes in a pile on the floor and digging for matching socks each morning. Okay, I’m guilty. I’ve kept my clothes in a pile before. But it made the once-daily task of getting dressed a frustrating experience. When it’s your only method of saving digital files, this “file-by-pile” system costs your business serious money.

According research by Susan Feldman published in Knowledge Worker World, this mess of information is responsible for about $5,000 in losses per employee, per year. She notes, “Knowledge workers spend from 15% to 35% of their time searching for information … Searchers are successful in finding what they seek 50% of the time or less.” Lost data (e.g. files on a shared server) has been blamed for several large disasters including a lost satellite by NASA. But it’s the small, daily disasters that are eating your companies profits. Some 40% of Feldman’s research participants reported “that they can not find the information they need to do their jobs on their intranets.”

This week, Microsoft launches Live Mesh, the first in what will likely be a new era of live, file-sharing technologies. According to Microsoft, using Live Mesh is simple. Just like putting your files on your local hard drive and the shared drive at the same time.

The pluses? There are plenty. You can access your files and applications from anywhere. A “news feed” similar to the one in Facebook lets you know when others have updated particular files. It offers the potential for fewer copies of files, better version tracking, and more.

But, as we learned in college, we can be messy at times. Add roommates and the potential for mess grows exponentially. In that vein, Live Mesh has the potential to become a live mess. It’s like dorming with your entire company, only the living room is bigger, the door to your room can’t be closed and the news feed is constantly telling you what the mess looks like.
Unless, of course, we listen to mom and keep our rooms (drives) neat.

If you haven’t done so already, start a conversation with your IT department about efficient filing methods that everyone can use. In The Pyramid Group training, we suggest a particular method, but any system is better than none at all.

Shared technological systems can only reflect our shared human system. If it’s a mess, we’ll get a networked mess. We’ll also exacerbate our file and find problems. Now, more than ever, we’ve got to start talking about better ways to organize our files.

Live Mesh (or something like it) is the future of file storage and collaborative work. Our storage spaces will inevitably converge online. As this happens, our filing and storage efficiency moves from convenient to critical. These new technologies tout real features, but only organizations with an efficient approach to sharing will reap the benefits.

“Garbage in, garbage out” still rings true. (Oh yeah, mom says take out the garbage, too.)