The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

10.5. Designing and Implementing an Organizing System

Requirements define what must be done but NOT how to do it; that’s the role of the design and implementation phases. Being explicit about requirements and the intended scope and scale of an organizing system before moving onto these phases in an organizing system’s lifecycle avoids two problems. The first is taking a narrow and short-term focus on the initial resources in a collection, which might not be representative of the collection when it reaches its planned scope and scale. This can result in overly customized and inflexible resource descriptions or arrangements that cannot easily accommodate the future growth of the collection. A second problem, often a corollary of the first, is not separating design principles from their implementation in some specific environment or technology.

10.5.1. Choosing Scope- and Scale-Appropriate Technology

A simple organizing system to satisfy personal record keeping or some short-lived information management requirements can be implemented using folders and files on a personal computer or by using “off the shelf” generic software such as web forms, spreadsheets, databases, and wikis. Other simple organizing systems run as applications on smart phones. Some small amount of configuration, scripting, structuring or programming might be involved, but in many cases this work can be done in an ad hoc manner. The low initial cost to get started with these kinds of applications must be ...