My friend Bob and I are teaching together the next couple of days, and I know he gets excited about PIM stuff.  Not quite a PIM-head, perhaps, but a PIM-head-in-training.

We had a not-altogether-clear preliminary conversation about what PIM use case would make Bob buy PIM software.

What excites him, like many, is making better use of his contacts.  Matt may be a doc at Hopkins with life-science research cred (complete fictional example btw) but he’s also an expert on smoking meat.    And his wife is a patent attorney.

You could imagine several ways to code up Matt as a contact (using categories or labels or the like) but two things rise up to bite you: 1) you don’t know all the uses of Matt you’re going to make downstream (you may take an interest in scuba later on, and Matt is a certified dive instructor) and 2) the collection of all the possible labels becomes unwieldy itself; you can’t remember how to code up a smoked-meats expert and end up inventing several labels and making the mess worse.  You now have to scroll down through a hairy ontology-ish beast in order to search or browse, and chances are you won’t.

This was a down payment on a further discussion.  Someday when magically there’s more time Bob and I are going to sit down for a hour or two and work through the various use cases.  It’ll be fun.