Visual Information Governance – Not so fast

Although we develop highly sophisticated classification software and address information governance, I am going to share an article on a new company, with a technology for classification using visualization. The article, posted by Forbes was entitled, “Visual Document Classification: Changing the Dynamics of Information Governance”. Of course I had to read it.

It is interesting software, although I would state that it is an unimaginable stretch to associate it with Information Governance.  Based on the article, for all of us old fogeys who still enhance text based classification software, the purpose of the software is to classify documents with little text or no text. That I think is promising and certainly has its niche. Still not a panacea for information governance woes.

The crux of the software, as I understand it, is visual clusters are automatically formed based on the appearance of the document, regardless of the type of file, such as Word or pdf. A person evaluates 1 or 2 documents per cluster and decides to keep it or not. If the document is kept, a document type from a 3 (yes 3) level document type taxonomy is assigned. Voila. Process is completed.

We will discard the mention of information governance. The majority of organizations have yet to adopt classification software at all. Do you think visualization as the sole means of classification would be more readily adopted? What do you think of the almost total elimination of human efforts? Is that good enough? Curious to hear your thoughts.