How many times have you vaguely remembered a project you worked on a few years ago and wanted to review it as a template for what you are working on now? Frequently Needed Information is a need, like tags and metadata, but a need that is thoughtful and idiosyncratic to be put in a bucket for you only.
When you need it, you know where to look. Like a drawer in the middle of the kitchen for quick access of useful utensils. The drawer has implicit shared knowledge as well, as members of the family know to use it as well. This is not Enterprise 2.0 or social media hype, this is essential information readiness.
Is there a feature like this in Webtop, CenterStage, or xCP? Not yet. Most frequently used is not necessarily what I need to look at for the next project. Should this be automatic or tagged? Should I only have to tag the content in the authoring program and not the from the content management system application UI? There's room for improvement.
Jeremy Rifkin knows how to build the pillars of the "Third Industrial Revolution". If energy creation is going the way of distributed green energy, then why can't we figure out distributed ECM? Is it that centralized control and production of ECM software is still too proprietary and entrenched in our hierarchical businesses?
Decentralized pods of information gathering and projection could emerge as a possible solution. Every business unit would be on its own, but have to play within the rules and make sense to the whole or they will fail. Business units already have relationships, and control patterns in their normal daily tasks, now they need to fashion their use of technology to these habits.
The "man" is turning into the "people", we just don't realize it yet. Facebook realizes it with relationships, now it's time for business to let go of the reigns of information and to start the new information revolution within their companies. Rules and regulations will still dictate process and procedures in some aspects of information gathering, however individuals and groups will slowly gain more and more license to gather their own utensils in the kitchen drawer and use them effectively. Enterprise 2.0 should really be Distributed Information 1.0.
