Have you ever been on one of those time management type courses where the statistics for time wasted searching for things are quoted? For example, 2 weeks of your life per year looking for misplaced files/items. I think of it every time I am searching for my car keys! The advice is to know where you file things—“a place for everything and everything in its place” as my Great Aunt Edith used to say.

We must all go through this at home and at work. Filing documents in a good place, but not always remembering to file and not always finding exactly the best place for documents so that we can go straight to them.

Equally, if not more important, today, is the digital world of PC storage, e-mail and file systems at work, as we all organise ourselves with folders, shortcuts and favourites to make it easy to quickly go to the information and documents that we need. We all do it and we all watch colleagues going up and down through their, often complex, file hierarchies to find relevant documents and answer queries. The more organised they are—the less time it takes to get the answer.

But it could be that the age of filing systems is coming to an end? With the power of search engines currently available to individual users (from Microsoft, Google, AltaVista and many others) it may be easier to abandon our attempts to be organised and let the engine do the work searching for information each time?

Taking this to an even higher level, searching for information across organisations can now be facilitated by Enterprise Search technologies (from Oracle, Google, IBM, Kazeon and others) so that documents relating to items or processes can be unearthed, even if the employee has not followed the exact procedures and filed correctly. The power of such tools is impressive, with their various ‘crawlers’ enabling speedy access to documents and information. There is no doubt that they save time, for example in audits, unearthing materials that may have been scattered intentionally or otherwise, through the corporate network, helping to complete the audit of procedures or forensic audit in the case of failures. If they are this powerful today I wonder if there will soon be no need to have structured menu & file systems in the workplace?

Would it save time if we did not devise folders & sub-folders on our corporate network? What about all those hours spent designing the intranet or public internet site—as we deliberate about the site map—the relevant tabs and subsections for solutions that aim to guide the public, or employees, to the information that they want. These can be a frustration. After drilling down through a few levels and not getting to the right information—maybe they do more harm than good?

The youth and younger employees today, I'm told (by a Google representative), just use search for everything. I cannot envisage a world without folders and sub-folders, tabs and sub-sections but, I'm told, I am simply old-fashioned. I remain convinced that it is still quicker for me to have a route to folders and a set of favourites for my regularly used items—rather than searching for them and picking from several possible options returned to me. Also to be able to organise related documents into a folder—a search may not find all documents related to a particular project, for example. Surely all the search tools mentioned above are aimed at searching for exceptions, the unknowns, the missing documents—and that is their best purpose.

But maybe I am constrained by the way I have learned systems—indeed learned all my science, by classifications and filing. Maybe in a generation, no-one will use filing systems at all, simply storing documents with a few tags so that all documents will be accessible in a more timely fashion by searching?