PIMTech

Each year, a pen and a new agenda paper with a few notebooks used to be enough for us to manage nearly all kind of information and get organized anywhere. But progressively dematerialization of all our information in the last decades has promised us faster, easier and more secure ways to use our information, collaborate and increase our productivity. Or has it ?

So many solutions for Personnal Information Management exists nowadays, with sometimes amazing technologies. But yet they remain deceptive and do not meet promises. Which is a paradox. Personnal Information Management is tough.

We can distinguish three types of solutions with different advantages and inconvenients :

1. Files and folders solutions
   • Advantages : Can be easily put in place for anything, secured on all platform and for free
   • Inconvenients : Requires to adopt a naming convention and a structure once for all, can be tricky to maintain or to share for that reason
2. Sheet/Notes solutions
   • Advantages : Can be setup for nearly any need (except for files like pictures) ; includes basic data manipulation and formating features ; easy to use and maintain and customize ; can import or export in open format data
   • Inconvenients : Not specific to a domain and so is very limited functionaly, you must build around it to extend it (and so spend some time to learn how to optimize it) or buy extensions
3. Specialized solutions
   • Advantages : often specialized, can be powerful in specific domain
   • Inconvenients : comes often at a cost (software license or subscription), proprietary technology (database, encryption), often limited to a domain, you’ll have to accept to externalize a part of your data (not all will be centralized) and use (depending on the domain) different solutions which are not integrated together.

Each type of solution can be online (SaaS : Software as a Service) or offline (installed on your device(s)) which has also advantages and inconvenients.

Finally we’ll give you some example of what we mean by solutions existing today :

If business have today centralized system for all they data or ERP : Entreprise Resource Planning solutions, the individual have only pieces of solutions spread apart and yet a major challenge to control all the personnal data which has been dematerialized for « his own good ».