elizabeth grigg - the other fourth meal

I'm thinking about how documents are king. On your computer, you have not created an initiative or a contact, you're created or edited a document. Documents can be copied this way or that. What they don't have is a strong relationship to data. The data is lying within those documents, waiting to be abstracted into other forms du jour.

My realization is that if the documents did not exist, only the data, then you could generate documents like you generate reports from the data. Some text annotation, some pictures of couch potatoes blissfully using remote controls via clip art, and you're back to where you started. But with some essential differences:

1) Searching - in a relevant and contextual way, such as keyword = project name as opposed to keyword = mentioned at all
2) Revision control - so no need to store 18 versions as you polish your ppt to a shiny sheen. There is only ever one query on your data, only ever one ppt.
3) Focus - you can view the world as many slices of the data. Perhaps you're looking for a competitive matrix. Perhaps you're building contact info. These are all slices. Run the report. No need for ordinary busy people to maintain docs all the time
4) Blatant intended audience - similar to selecting "Mood" in your music metadata, you could select "Executive" when looking for only business cases, reorgs, budgets, metrics.

Now your brain hurts too! I feel better