Comment by zie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zie | Hacker News Reader

When it gets bad enough you need this for an organization, you hire a "librarian"[0], it's literally their job to classify and keep track of information. They have a whole degree program called Library and information science.

Let the experts handle this stuff. How many times have you found some super important production piece being handled in a disaster of Excel and 400 different versions all named ridiculous things, and nobody knows which is the right one to use? Why? Because they didn't bring software development in soon enough.

0: Librarian is our commonly understood word for the broad profession of information management, but the experts tend to have many different job titles for their discipline, get a subject matter expert(I'm not one) to help you track down the right job title for your specific project.

I think most people here are applying this to their personal notes/projects.

Johnny here. I think more people should apply this at work.

I work on large IT transformation projects and the disorganisation and resulting waste of time and money is borderline criminal.

I found the latest powerpoint in my emails instead of the sharepoint, can confirm, borderline criminal.

I assume this is sarcastic, so allow me to offer this point directly from recent experience.

I worked on a multi-million dollar transformation project for the federal government.

Nobody had any idea where anything was. Eventually they found the 'latest PowerPoint' in their email, instead of SharePoint.

Except it wasn't the latest. They just thought it was. So they updated it, and distributed it, and then looked stupid and had to do it again. And lost all respect and trust from the customer.

And then when the project failed the auditor came in to try to figure out why, and it was reasonably obvious.

Meanwhile the taxpayer is paying for this. That's me and you. If this mid-sized transformation project has a $10m budget and every person wastes just a minute every hour looking for a file -- conservative, in my experience -- then we're talking hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars.

So, yeah. Borderline criminal in my view.

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