The absolute necessity of an index
The more I think about the index the more I come to think that its existence is an absolute necessity.
It hit me watching The Office last week. David Brent is introducing a new work experience girl. This is 2001: everyone still has a massive CRT monitor on their desk.
"Everyone's got email", he tells her. "Have you used email before?"1
In 2001 the PC was still fairly novel. We certainly didn't all have one at home. We had them at work, but they were slow and clunky. Hard drive space was severely constrained. We weren't creating that much data -- we couldn't if we tried -- so there just wasn't that much to keep track of.
Just over 20 years later and the world couldn't be more different. All of us use computers all day. The amount of data that we are generating has exploded, and we haven't changed our behaviour at all.
None of us have been given any training, and the way we store and retrieve data hasn't changed. We still just make stuff, wonder where to save it, and drop it in some hastily-named folder somewhere expecting to be able to find it later.
Sitting writing this in the garden, I look to the garage for an analogy. It's full of labelled boxes of stuff.2 Imagine if nothing was labelled. It'd be chaos. But the analogy breaks down, because at least the garage is finite. At least there are only so many boxes I can put in any given box, or how deep my box nesting can go.
These constraints on sanity do not exist on your file system.
A more appropriate analogy is a large library. Imagine your national library without a catalogue. That's no longer a library: it's just a building full of books.
The action is on you
And so if you run a project or a department and you don't use an index, what exactly are you expecting to happen? Are you hoping that people will just magically know where everything is?
I think we're all deluded. I'm not blaming you; this has crept up on us all. It doesn't feel like 20 years since I first saw The Office. But here we are. You know there's a problem now. Go and do something about it.
Imagine on your first day instead of being given the company org chart, being given access to the index.
Imagine being able to know what exists, and where it is.