Connecting Brains to Brains
And doing so in a scalable manner
When you work for a small company, it’s easy to share information. You can either walk over to someone’s cube, email them, pick up the phone, IM them, or whatever. You have a question and someone else has the answer, so you take the path of least resistance — which also happens to be the most brute force and least scalable one.
As companies grow, the ability to do this changes. People start working in other offices, from home, or even from different time zones. It becomes less and less easy to get that answer — and more importantly — share those answers with others.
The natural reaction to this problem is to invest in some sort of tool. From what I’ve seen, most companies are very near sighted in their tool selection, only to end up requiring more tools in the future. Chaos ensues.
So, how do we choose the best tool for sharing knowledge? The answer: CRUD.
Collaboration Tools and the CRUD Factor
Most tools out there do one thing really well, and fall short when it comes to other important things. When it comes to collaboration tools and knowledge, the most important factors are Creation, Reading, Updating, and Deleting (CRUD).
CRUD isn’t a new term — it is commonly known as the four basic functions of persistent storage. It also applies to knowledge tools. According to the CRUD page on Wikipedia:
It is also sometimes used to describe user interface conventions that facilitate viewing, searching, and changing information; often using computer-based forms and reports.
Applied to a collaboration tool:
- Create — How easy is it for someone to contribute?
- Read — Can users easily find what they’re looking for? Once they’ve found it, how easily can they consume it?
- Update — How easy is it for someone to update what’s there?
- Delete — Is it just as easy to remove outdated / irrelevant information?
If a collaboration tool doesn’t make it extremely easy for users to perform all aspects of CRUD extremely well, the tool simply will not scale.
Creating a Scalable Solution
The only way to scale the problem of distributing knowledge from many brains to many is to have the right tools in place, and to ensure people are using them in the most effective manner.
When users are sharing information, it needs to be shared directly in its purest form — typically text, an image, audio, or video — on that centralized CRUD tool. My most common advice is:
- Only share knowledge using links
- Never use files
Having a CRUD tool in place is only half of the problem. If people continue to share knowledge via email, IM, or in documents, the system will fall apart. Therefore in order for a scalable solution to work, every brain needs to be on board.
