The importance of lists

Happy New Year? Not on Friday

So there I was driving back up the M1 motorway following a meeting in East London. I was so absorbed in my thinking that I completely missed two junctions and found myself at Junction 18 adding another half an hour to my journey. Poo.

Anyway, what I was so self-abosrbed in was the subject of LISTS. What got me thinking about lists was the conversation I had just had with the sales director of an office equipment company. It reminded me of a problem that just keeps surfacing. When sales people use CRM systems they quite rightly complain about the time it takes to fill in all of the record data. Why? becuase the user doesn't always want to add (or see) all of the data that managers do. They just want to order their thinking and make sure they spend their time on the most important things rather than the 'can do' subjects that are sometimes easier to do but are less beneficial in achieving outcomes.

The technology problem with this is that databases - particularly relational databases - demand that users fill out a certain level of fields of data in order to maintain the linkages between tables and provide coherency in the quality of data. But this results in users being presented with too many fields of data to fill in at times when they just want to create a list.

You see the reason why products like Google search don't work in business is CONTEXT. All information in business has to be associated with its purpose, the topics it relates to, the people who need it, the processes it serves. So business is about LISTS and DATA the relationships between them. But we've not got that balance right yet - which is why information workers still feel poorly served by IT (me too).....and so I missed my junction, two infact and ended up north of Coventry on a miserable day with sub zero temperatures and a dirty windscreen that my frozen screenwash couldn't clear feeling marginally sorry for myself.

So here's the challenge - how to create a simpler way for information workers to create, access, order, edit and prioritise lists on different subjects where items can be converted into records and those record can be developed into relational database tables. Ironically, we (I should say Andy) solved this problem at NDMC in 2003 but I'd forgotten that we had - so my New Year Resolution is to fix this problem once and for all and incorprate the new usability features into Encanvas 2.0 when it gets released (which if we're lucky will be before 2010!)