In the organization I’m currently working in,
there are filing cabinets everywhere.
In the four months I’ve been there,
I’ve never seen anyone take anything out of those files.
They put paper in.
It doesn’t come out.
Why?
Because the filing cabinet is dead.
Search has replaced it.
Douglas Merrill, chief information officer for Google
in February’s Men’s Health says
“How much easier is it to organize ourselves
if instead of thinking of the world in terms of filing cabinets,
we start thinking of the world in terms of search?
For example,
when I come across something interesting
on the Internet,
I don’t worry about whether I’ll ever use it.
I just dump it into my personal online cloud.
Organization then becomes this loose pile of information
that’s growing forever, and
you don’t care,
because every time you ask a question,
you get everything back that’s relevant.”