Organizational Dark Data

How easy is it to manage your organization's content when you don't know where a lot this content is?" The answer is simple, you can not! This is due largely to the fact that many employee's are not knowledgable about the content and/or do not know where to begin to research the content. In the article, Working with Organizational Dark Data, Paul Chin discusses intranet (an internet like network whose scope is restricted to the networks within a particular organization) dark data (something that you cannot see directly but knows exist due to the affect that it has on other things).

In 1990, organization's begin to use intranets as a corporate content management tool to store all sorts of information shying away from tools that were previously used such as: word processor documents, spreadsheets, PDF files, structured databases, proprietary applications, hard copy documents stored in file cabinets, employees' e-mail, discussion groups and blogs, and inside employee's head. With the impletation of the intranet, organizations could better manage information made available to their employee's by dispersing content into a centralized environment that could be easily navigated. However, the question still remained: How much of this content truly made it onto the corporate intranet?" No one truly knows but, one thing they did know was that it existed because of the effects in corporate efforts such as: presentations, conversations, and emails.

Dark data comes in all shapes and sizes with some being more useful than others. However, to fully understand the concept of dark data one must know that it has two main classes: undiscovered and concealed. Undiscovered is that content that has been lost, no one knows where it is, or if it truly exist. Concealed is that content that is intentionally hidden by it's owner(s) for personal use and/or gain.