For 11 years, Tapiero, whose business is called The Organized Library, has made a living by bringing order to corporations' chaos. Armed with a master's degree in library science, a no-nonsense manner, a natural bent for organizing, and raves from corporate clients, Tapiero cleans up the paper trails others leave behind. The next challenge is to fashion a corporate library out of what remains. Creating the catalog is a formidable task, as she has to create customized category headings for each client. The librarian's traditional tool, the Dewey Decimal System, is of little help here because each of her clients' information troves is unlike any other.
Assistants hired by the client do the tedious work of inputting all the information.
This Mess Tapiero finds that most companies accumulate information until it becomes too overwhelming to be of use. Everybody has stuff. The typical response is a file cabinet with folders in alphabetical order. It takes some companies two years, others up to ten, to realize that survival itself may hinge on being able to find information quickly. While the librarian in Tapiero is genuinely distressed by how far out of hand things get before an information plan is put into place, the businesswoman in her rejoices.