Less haste, better standards

By Mark Field

We live in a very fast world and it’s getting faster every day. Generally, most people say that this is a bad thing but their actions seem to contradict them. We drive faster in our cars and we want results in our businesses sooner. We talk endlesslessly about stress, but it isn’t created by wandering down to the corner shop for a bottle of wine and a rental DVD. It’s because we do more work, faster.

Except we don’t. At least the English don’t. Every bit of research into working practices and productivity shows that the English work for twelve hours a day and produce either very little, or something very big that does no-one any good at all. Like consultancy reports – millions produced every year – big thick things and all largely pointless. Even I, a slightly disappointed disciple of knowledge management (KM) who has difficulty finding more than the dozen or so original and canonical KM success stories (that are all at least ten years old), have never heard anyone tell me that a consultancy produced a big report for them and things definitely got better as a result. Clearly, on this basis, all mainstream consultancy should stop and we should do lots of KM because it has at least got twelve plausible stories, even if they’re looking a bit faded around the edges.

So, ‘slowness’ in the context of achieving real impact becomes very interesting. Take as an example information standards, all of them: metadata standards, communication protocols, the whole lot. Computers have been around since the 1960s, and the telephone as we know it has been around since the late 19th century. Yet the web was only born in, erm, 1991. What was going on for thirty years? Faffing about, that’s what. When a standardisation group is established, its first task is to survey competing standards. We now have meta-standards that provide frameworks for collections of standards, many of which have not been fully adopted and may never be. Standards are seen by vendors as an opportunity to gain control of a defining part of their industry, while appearing altruistic to us. Like we’re that dumb? The net result is that we take years to make a worse mess than we set out to tidy up in the first place.

I wrote a paper on information standards in 1994, predicting full and open information-exchange protocols within three years. Boy was I wrong. We’re still waiting for a sensible content-format standard; a usable, unique and persistent identifier standard; and any amount of standards for indexing and description. PDF is nearly there as a format standard but it’s proprietary, which is not good, whatever Adobe says. Digital Object Identifier is flailing around and the real adoption rate of descriptive standards like the UK’s Government Category List, is pathetic.

So there are two types of slowness: bad slowness and good slowness. We could have had a useful, well-structured internet, in the same way that we could have useful well-structured intranets, a long time ago. We will have both, one day, but not while we try to mix the Anglo-Saxon tendency for unproductive thrashing about and energetic competition with standardisation. Information standards are not like VHS versus Betamax. Somebody needs to settle down to slow, steady, cooperative work to create the open standards we need. But let us not be downhearted. Panizzi’s 91 Rules for Cataloguing appeared in 1841. The Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules Second Edition appeared in 1978. They work wonderfully everywhere. 137 years of the right sort of work is all it takes. n

Mark Field is group leader of library services, Dstl Knowledge Services (part of 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.