Institutional Knowledge

Problem

There are a ton of applications being developed locally at your institution and you have no way of knowing who is doing what or how they are doing it. You don’t know what data they are pulling, where they are pulling it from, what they are gathering and where they are storing it all. You don’t know if you’re re-inventing a wheel that another department already developed. Worse, you don’t even really know what defines an “application.” Even if you did know all of those things, how would you keep that knowledge current? You, are in the dark.

Welcome. Unfortunately this isn’t a typical IK post where we go into detail on how to deal with a technical issue or show you pretty stat graphs. No, this is where I’m simply going to outline the issues associated with this problem and hope that somebody has already gone down this path…and that it didn’t lead to madness.

Defining an Application

Is a script an application? What about a script that takes form input and sends it to an e-mail address with no database involved at all? How small do you go? Before you start you need to agree on what makes an application. This, could take a while.

Finding Applications and Developers

Once you’ve establish what constitutes an application, now you have to find them and more importantly, the people that made them. It’s a typical problem and luckily one that has been solved before. You need to start as high as you can and start working your way down until you discover the technical people. You probably already know a good portion of these folks, but there are undoubtedly people you don’t know about that are developing and maintaining applications somewhere on campus. If you’re going to be thorough, you’ll need to find them.

Tracking

If you’ve tried to keep track of anything on campus you’ve most likely discovered that unless it’s fully automated, you have a problem. Scratch that. You have problems. Plural. You can ask people for updated information over e-mail, which will get you a few well-meaning responses and a lot of crickets. You can send out a spreadsheet for people to updated which will leave you in ‘multiple file revision’ Hell. You might even be so bold as to develop your own application that will allow people to update their own information online. You might even have asked at some point, “How hard can it be?” The problem is that no matter how easy you make this, you are essentially asking other people to do something for you, and therein lies the rub. How can you ask people to do this for you? This is more a people problem than a technology problem, but it’s a problem nonetheless.

Permissions

For the sake of argument, lets say that we’ve solved the people problem of getting updated information with the application we developed. Now, who gets to see what once they’ve gotten inside. If it is locked down so that people can only see their own information, you’ve created a system that requires them to do work with no real value to them. There is no real benefit in a person only seeing their own information. They’ll most likely want to have access to all the information so they can see what others are doing as well. That was the whole point of the application in the first place, right? So, you open the system and have no restrictions on who can see what. That idea is scary to a lot of people and more than likely they have valid reasons for being wary of this venture. Again, we’ve run into a people problem.

Summary

We have a blind spot on campus and we want to use technology to help illuminate ourselves to what is happening. The technology solution requires that campus agree on a definition, dedicating time to keep the information current, and who has access. These are things that must be dealt with by people. These are issues which no matter how much technology you throw at them, they will not go away.

Solutions?

Have you tackled this dragon? Did you win? If so, we would love to hear your story. Actually, we would love to hear your story even if you lost.