The Impact of Moving from Final Versions to Early Drafts

An excerpt from page 13 of the 2006 Burton Group Collaboration and Content Strategies report, "The Copernican Revolution in Content," bears repeating:

Content management has moved upstream in the creation process over the years. In the past, secretaries typed only important documents, such as major memos and contracts, since it was too expensive and time-consuming to type ephemera. However, as employees began typing e-mails, they started to document unformed thoughts, while blogs now capture thought snippets and distribute them to potentially millions of readers. Wikis are literally works in progress.

While capturing work-in-progress content helps employees collaborate, it also brings with it an increased compliance burden. Rather than locking up a set of file cabinets containing important documents, enterprises must now archive memos, spreadsheets, e-mails, instant messages, pictures, and a host of other digital content. Furthermore, depending on content type, this can become a complex process. For example, a company may retain e-mails for two years, but contracts for seven. This means that if a contract is e-mailed, the archiving system must store the contract and the e-mail separately, so the contract does not vanish when the system destroys the e-mail transaction.

Generating content earlier in the process also means that enterprises must offer a spectrum of control. While companies must ensure that final versions of documents are secure and cannot be altered, such control is anathema to wikis, which exist just so scores of employees can modify them collectively.

Two years after writing this, I find that people still miss this pattern: the shift from businesses (1) creating only final versions to (2) creating the full spectrum of documents, ranging from early drafts to working versions to officially published documents. Since this shift occurred slowly--it's a three decade span between the heyday of typewriters and the arrival of wikis--it's not surprising that people still don't recognize the change. However, once you convert to this worldview, a whole bunch of Aha! moments take place.

For example, this helps explain the explosion in digital content that needs to be searched and backed up. When secretaries held sway, not a lot got written down. Now that everyone has turned into a typist, the entire corporation can generate content, not just 5% of it. Furthermore, not only has the group that creates content exploded in size, but the range of content has expanded as well: from final memos to drafts to e-mails to blog posts to IMs.

In addition, a lot of the management concern about things such as blogs and wikis comes from the fact that unformed thoughts are now written down. In the past, a lot of employees would blurt out, "Well, that's a stupid idea," but they'd do so in the cafeteria or around the water cooler. While the sentiment would be passed along informally, there was no official record of it. This has changed with the arrival of blogs and wikis, and that leads to a cascade of secondary effects: employees' feelings being hurt, warring factions breaking out, and potential liability if those comments are discovered in a court case. Thirty years ago it was normal and acceptable to have "offhand comment amnesia"; now, with digital content being created all the time, that's impossible.

Finally, the area in the market that's hot are the products that help people collaborate and generate early drafts: things such as blogs, wikis, search, and social networks. While free products such as Lotus Symphony and OpenOffice.org help enterprises save money, they don't necessarily make employees more productive. Based on thirty years of practice, we now know how to generate working and final versions; it's creating early drafts in a productive fashion that we're still trying to figure out.

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