Yesterday, Joel Spolsky talked about Software Inventory (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html), and mentioned a minimalistic project management tool that he would like to see made called "Five Things". Well, I think that we have a bigger problem of Intellectual Inventory - a glut of information, too many books, academic papers and articles that sit on the to-read list, all relevant, all interesting, and not enough time left in our life to digest it all. (It is true ... I did the sums - I have about 300 years worth of reading in my backlog)
So here is my problem: Intellectual Inventory management; productivity optimization; focus management.
Beware, there are solutions (Hyperion for financials, Business Objects for BI, etc.), but those are all too low level and they have no decent way to build views or to consolidate information from different sources, so people resort to the dreaded Excel, a piece of tech 20 yrs old.
I am pretty sure that technically this is not a big problem, there is no need for Big Data or real time or the like, but anything worth considering has to have a great user experience as Excel has got people used to click their ways out of troubles all the time (at cost of wasting hours on things that should take a couple of minutes).
Anyway, I like things stored locally on my machine. With paranoia driving the gov't, I don't want to make it easy for them to root around in my life. Let them serve me with a search warrant, not a Cloud firm behind my back and without my knowledge.