What is Holistic Information Support?

Following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of the first draft of "Designing Effective Information Support Systems".

What does Holistic mean?

Look at the word ‘holistic’ in your dictionary. The definitions vary between dictionaries, but basically they use words like inclusive, encompassing, pervasive, persistent, looking at the whole picture.

Like a lot of buzzwords, it gets misused.

What does holistic have to do with information support?

Holistic information support is:

• cradle to grave support (whole-of-life, not just whole-of-project),
• pervasive (it’s everywhere),
• inclusive (it takes in the needs of all stakeholders), and
• persistent (it lasts).

Let’s look at those in a bit more detail.

Cradle to grave means that the support exists for the life of the application, not of the project that produces the application. One of the many failures of the traditional “get the engineer to throw the documentation together at the end of the project” model is that engineers move on to new projects and take their subject matter expertise with them. What happens the next time the application is upgraded or replaced in the absence of the original developers?

Pervasive means that the support is everywhere within the organization. There are no self-documenting pockets left to do their own thing. This will work, more or less, until the first reorganization.

Inclusive means that it takes into consideration the needs of all of the stakeholders – not just the end users. Inadequate design documentation has caused no end of misery for those who come after the original designers, left to flounder through the same waters that their predecessors swam through a few years before. Inclusive user and task analysis takes in all relevant stakeholders.

Persistent means that the information support is continuous – not just for one product or application, but across all of them. Consistency is a real information usability factor – familiarity breeds both content and user contentment.

The Times They Are A Changing

Following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of the first draft of "Designing Effective Information Support Systems".

JoAnne Hackos, in her book ‘Managing Your Documentation Project’, talks about the development of documentation systems within an organization.

Things start with some of the people doing their own documentation, some of the time, in a haphazard way.

People then start to develop some internal standards, and employ some documentation production and management specialists.

The organization then realizes that they can save time and money, and reduce customer complaints (both internal and external), if they formalize the whole business of documentation.
Imagine this formalization concept extending to the whole spectrum of information support – all manner of documentation, from the online help used by the telephone company call center staff to the user manual supplied with your new toaster. This is the way that the world is going – towards integrated information support, looked after by specialists.

There was a time where, in some software development areas, a set of standard documentation was produced for each product, regardless of what the product was or who was expected to use it. Thus we had situations where four kilogram (ten pound) paper manuals were being produced at great expense for computer operators who really only wanted one page of shortcut keys that they photocopied out and stuck to the side of their terminals. The rest of the manual made a great doorstop.

The knee-jerk reaction of “we have a system, therefore we need a user manual”, usually tacked on at the end of the project as punishment duty for junior software developers is over. We’re now living in web time, where integration of the information support professional into the project team is becoming more common.

Beyond this integration has to come holistic information support, where all necessary factors are considered (or as many of them as possible) prior to the design of the solution.

Designing Effective Information Support Systems

This blog exists in support of a book project. Designing Effective Information Support Systems (DEISS) is a long-term thing - I put the first concept down on paper in 2001, wrote a first draft a couple of years later, and every now and then I pull it out again and think about it.

The basic idea is that the information support system for a software or hardware product should be designed to be as effective as possible - with the same standard of professionalism and thought. It should be a holistic system - encompassing the needs of all stakeholders, not just the end users.

From time to time I will update this blog with excerpts from this work in slow progress - it will not be a high-volume blog, but hopefully some of the things I go on about will be worth reading and commenting on.

Until next time, Andrew