Taking the DAFT approach

I was recently at Umbrella, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professional’s biennial UK conference, in Manchester. This year, we had 800 people with various job titles and a common background in information work, who were learning, sharing work practices, and getting psychotically drunk in Canal Street.

There were sessions on storytelling – an activity that many of you will already be exploring in community of practice work – and there were sessions on evidence-based practice (EBP), a discipline for shaping work processes and policy that is slowly spreading out from the health sector, which can reasonably claim to have brought this good idea to the world.

I had always seen storytelling not just as a means of communicating complex ideas or learning in a simple way, but also a method of gathering useful ideas, practices and business cards from people, which might do you some good later.

EBP struck me from the first as being a sensible idea. Why should we do things that have no real-life justification, benefit or business purpose? Better still, let’s ask some questions: why do we do this? What good does it do? All a bit utilitarian, but good for getting you out of a hole when you’re hung over and haven’t prepared for a very important meeting.

During a session by Peter Brophy of Manchester Metropolitan University, it occurred to me that, by combining storytelling and EBP in a formal discipline, we might solve one of the great problems with information: customer has been sold £3.5m worth of software and professional services – was it worth it?

So, I am now proposing a new standard: the ‘Does It Actually Work’ (DIAW, pronounced like Dior) standard. Clearly, if this were just a qualitative fluffy bunny measure, nobody would take it seriously. So, it has a ‘developed assessment framework test’ (DAFT), which looks like this:

1. What does it do?
Use your answer to explore, at length, every episode of management confusion that you can recall since you were recruited.

2. How much will it hurt?
Answer in two words.

3. Are we there yet?
Answer yes or no.

4. Is everybody using it every day?
Answer yes or no

5. Is it any good?
Answer yes or no

6. Why do we need it?
Use your answer to explore, at length, every episode of management confusion that you can recall since you were recruited.

Controversially, the final question is, conventionally, the first question. Putting it last is the result of 3.4 billion human years of ‘critical-observation-connected knowledge’, modified by the ‘business-utilisation-linked levee’. This found that business purpose can only be determined 90 days after trying to impress a young person (wearing a badly-fitting suit on an exhibition stand) with the currency of your technological insight. Or when you’ve signed the contract. Or both.

More controversially, the answers to questions one and six are completely ignored by the complex algorithm that is applied to the results of the DAFT, but it’s good to get these things off your chest. Question two is the critical threshold determinant: unless the answer is ‘a lot’ or higher then, evidentially, the whole exercise must be pointless. Even more controversially, decomposing any DIAW question into 322 ‘mandatory’ and ‘desirable’ sub-questions is punishable by death. The answers to three, four and five require highly-skilled interpretation. I can be contacted via the Ark Group. My day rates start at $10,000, depending on how big your head office is.

So, industry chums: you may hope to impress the customer by showing nine petabytes of PRINCE2 documentation and compliance with ISO 9000, ISO 15489, BS15000 and BS7799 at the end of the project, but they will only sign the cheque if you can prove that they’re completely DAFT. n

Mark Field is group leader of library services, Dstl Knowledge Services (part if the Ministry of Defence). The views expressed in this article are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of Dstl Knowledge Services.