I always suspected my coffee habit would lead me down a dark path.

I needed to find a wireless hotspot quickly yesterday to take care of a few emails.  Having remembered that Starbucks shifted to “free” access, I quickly went to the nearest location.  What I discovered was “free” is in the eye of the beholder, and the simple act of signing up for wireless access is reflective of a broader change in how we value information.

To obtain web access at Starbucks, you have to follow a three step process:

            1) Register a valid Starbucks card

            2) Register the Starbucks card at starbucks.com

            3) Register for AT&T WiFi access

And voila, you are now connected to the internet.  But let’s look at the value exchanges which occur in this transaction. I no longer pay $10 for a day’s worth of access to the hotspot, but rather I must have available funds on my Starbucks card.  I am happy with this exchange as, to me, coffee is vital and I am happy to get wireless as my “gift with purchase”.

The more troubling value exchange is in the amount of personal information required to register the Starbucks card in Step 2.  The usual fields (name, email) are required entries, but so are your home address, phone number, and birth date (though not birth year).  The fact these are required indicates the value Starbucks places on this information from a marketing perspective.  They are willing to absorb the cost of the relationship with AT&T (the cost for providing the wireless) as long as they receive something they find more valuable: your required demographic information.

This devil’s bargain—I will sell you my identity if you let me have my email fix—made me think about how a similar bargain is created with the implementation of enterprise content management systems.

In this scenario, we have transformed metadata capture from a back-end activity (something done, for example, when a physical document is declared a record) to an event at document creation.  From a user’s perspective, the devil’s bargain is this—you will let me find my stuff more easily if I spend the effort up front to classify my information.  The value now is not in the document itself but rather its demographic information.

How do we persuade users to invest the time to accurately capture metadata?  I will post additional thoughts shortly, but would welcome your perspective as well.

Want some brimstone with that coffee?