Grand Unified Theory of Technical Support: The Five Laws of Information Management

First Law: Information Entropy

Information migrates toward anarchy.
Effort required to organize information is always perceived as greater than effort required to search through chaos.

Second Law: Authentication Conservation

Passwords migrate toward paper.
The more sophisticated password policies and password management tools are, the more likely passwords will be taped to horizontal or vertical surfaces.

Third Law: Deferred Maintenance Accumulation

Technology crises migrate toward prior user inaction.
Observed manifestations include postponed updates, ignored warnings, deferred archiving, neglected backups, forgotten passwords, skipped documentation, and the phrase:
"I was going to do that tomorrow."

Fourth Law: Knowledge Concentration

Documentation migrates toward a single person, preferably close to retirement.
Nobody else knows whether the latest copy is in SharePoint, Outlook, OneDrive, a shared drive, a thumb drive, or a Zip disk.

Fifth Law: Outlook Equilibrium

All systems, given sufficient time, evolve toward Outlook.
Users transform Outlook from a communications platform into a document management system.

Corollary Zero

Organizations do not lose information because it is missing.
Information is lost because no one knows where it is, which version is correct, who last modified it, what media stores it, or if the person with the knowledge departed.

Heavener, M., Cooper, B., & Carter, A.L. (2026). Grand Unified Theory of Technical Support: The Five Laws of Information Management in a Framework for Systematic Failure Expectation.
The authors wish to acknowledge support technicians, system administrators, and end users for their involuntary participation in this research.