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by Michael Cote.
Original Post: Links for 2005-11-19 [del.icio.us]
Feed Title: Cote's Weblog: Coding, Austin, etc.
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Feed Description: Using Java to get to the ideal state.
This 2002 piece from Gladwell about the paperful office is fascinating. The master of the counter-intuitive lays out why piles of uncomputerized paper are better than computerized paperlessness. The key is that the original content on paper is only part of the knowledge you'd need to capture. Much of the rest of it is locked up in the margin, in the way the paper is organized, how old it is, what it's filed with, and what memories the actual physical papers evoke in people's heads:
The correspondence, notes, and other documents such discussions would produce formed a significant part of the documents buyers kept. These materials therefore supported rather than constituted the expertise of the buyers. In other words, the knowledge existed not so much in the documents as in the heads of the people who owned them -- in their memories of what the documents were, in their knowledge of the history of that supplier relationship, and in the recollections that were prompted whenever they went through the files.
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