This month’s NACM Annual Conference had excellent presentations and conversations regarding where courts are heading given current and emerging technological, demographic, political, financial and social trends. Big players among the trends discussed included both networking and social media. One result for me was a couple of either epiphanies or mild mental episodes (hard to tell the difference sometimes).
NACM Keynote Speaker Seth Mattison[1] made the point that the post-baby boom generations have grown up in a totally different information, social and structural paradigm than boomers and their ancestors. Up through boomers, the paradigm was hierarchical, linear and flat. Mattison used the example of the Org Chart, top-down information, power and status flow.
For post-boomers, the paradigm is network. The very term “peer to peer” is completely antithetical to a hierarchical structure. Millennials don’t reflexively look for channels to go through—they go directly to the end target. Boomers are appalled that the “youngsters” (now in their 30s and early 40s) don’t get it. Meanwhile, Mattison points out, those “kids” grew up being the family CIO.
Regarding social media, much discussion centered around:
a) How do courts control it, and
b) How can courts use it?
Both are interesting and complex topics. IMHO[2], those aren’t the most important questions. Most important is not what social media does or how it works or who is using it. Rather, most important is that today’s social media is symptomatic of the very paradigm change that Mattison discussed.
Question: What does your preference in, say, music have in common with the Taj Mahal? My Answer: They’re both nodes on The Network of Everything.
What’s going on with social media is that information and records, to paraphrase Karl Heckart, Arizona Judicial Branch CIO, in his excellent NACM presentation, are “shifting from Analog to Digital”. The Internet arms race is expanding the population of network nodes –people, places, things, thoughts, relationships and more – at a rate and through dimensions inconceivable even five years ago. And the rate is exponentially accelerating.
The social media technology that’s driving the Internet has unstoppable momentum, and your court has no choice but to embrace it in order to manage it. If you don’t, your data will find its way into the social media realm without your control.
What does this portend for courts and the content that needs to be managed? Part of me answers honestly, “Darned if I know.” So much is unknown. Yet, another part of me thinks, here are a few things we can say with some certainty:
- Paper documents as containers for information may be a current challenge; but in ten years, they’ll likely be as relevant as drawings on the side of a cave in Madagascar. To the extent the informational elements in documents cannot be integrated to the Network of Everything, they’ll become irrelevant.
- The very concept of a document, in a fully networked universe, becomes quite different than what we use today. For example, in a paper-centric world, the defendant’s name or the charge may be part of many documents in a case file, from the Complaint to the Judgment. Yet in a digital, fully networked world, the defendant’s name is more correctly understood as a data element that is part of a number of associated groups of elements. Some of those groups might be loosely analogous to documents; others will not. Certain external parties and events will continue to require the reproduction of a document, but this will occur from data, on demand (a key component of “Paper on Demand,” about which I’ve previously written).
- Heck, social media has ALWAYS existed: The back fence, the telephone, surreptitious notes in class, gossip columns, TV and radio. The fundamental shift is in the mechanism of data transport. What’s changing so fast now is the relationships of people to one another and to the elements of the universe in which they live, enabled by technology that becomes increasingly transparent.
- Soon, we’ll likely see a continued expansion of the meaning and scope of Electronic Content Management. Already, it bears noting that ECM is about far more than managing electronic content. It’s about managing the relationships among an almost infinite variety of things that are networked, including documents, people, events, courts, responsibilities, rights… and more.
- But what about the “Process”? Because of the explosion of content, a key way to make sense of information in the Network of Everything paradigm will be – and probably already is – workflow technology. Workflow won’t just be AN important thing – it will be THE important thing, because content and people are all nodes on THE SAME NETWORK. Workflow is what makes their relationships to one another have useful and/or rational meaning.
So that’s what I think is facing the courts. Part of it, anyway. More later.