Information Management Strategies

Seeing the wood and the trees

Information Management Strategies across an organisation

Information is critical. Organisations need to see information for the asset it is and manage it accordingly. Think about a simple process in your business and trace where the information comes from. Here are some possibilities:

1. Databases
2. Electronic documents and spreadsheets
3. Emails
4. Your own intranet and internet pages
5. Third-party internet pages
6. Blogs, wikis, discussion boards and chat rooms
7. Paper
8. People’s heads

In the past such opaque storage of complex information has presented an obstacle that few organisations were willing to tackle but in recent years the situation has been transformed and every organisation that cares about its efficiency (or that of its competitors) needs to look again at information management.

The distribution of information is the fingerprint of your organisation’s culture. Most enterprises have information “silos”: isolated stores of data that support specific functions or business units. Nearly all enterprises have timely information trapped in unstructured documents, emails and in people’s heads. In smaller enterprises especially it is common practice to rely on the memory and personal notes of experienced key workers. (This touches on an underlying issue: the mitigation of risk.)

Improving the management of information always involves changing culture and that’s a difficult non-technological task requiring interpersonal skills and leadership. Is it worth it? Would you just be fixing something that ain’t that broke? Possibly - but it is worth re-visiting these questions that you may not have seriously asked for some time.

Think of the objectives of your organization and run through these questions (followed by common answers I have heard):

1. Do you have a strategy to achieve your objectives? (Yes)
2. Do your business processes reflect these? (The major ones do)
3. Are they employed by your staff? (Mostly – we have some exceptions)
4. Can those staff access the information they need? (I think so - usually)

This last question – “Can those staff access the information they need?” – is difficult to answer because what staff feel as a “need” is shaped by how they are used to working. Information can become unmanaged without anyone realising. For example, do some staff create folders full of Word documents through which other staff need to (or ought to) navigate? Do you find yourself trying to correlate the information in these documents with your emails? Is someone holding information in their “private” spreadsheet because it’s more “practical” then the central office copy?

Technology has changed this part of the picture, lowering the barrier of cultural change needed to implement improved information access. When it comes to the first question of enablement - “Can staff access the information they need?” – commercial, off-the-shelf information-management software has become a commodity. It is now practical, robust and affordable to even the smallest organisation.

Various office information systems provide this capability. Most enterprises run Microsoft Office and so it’s no surprise that Microsoft Sharepoint, which supports this functionality, is the clear market leader.

We are going to be our own case study. Since 2007, this is what I see when I look at the OCC Intranet:

This is an intranet portal that lets me search all electronic data as if it were in Google (so that’s everything in the list above - except “Peoples’ heads” but I’m working on that). The search can include my own emails but other staff don’t see content that they’re not authorised to see.

These systems can be set up to be accessible from outside the office over the Internet, for remote work. External users can log on to a special web address and see selected areas of information. At OCC, we often use Sharepoint to share content with our clients about their projects and deliverables: everything in one place. On a slightly larger scale, this is how Del Monte works with its sales brokers for trading food commodities. More than 400 active broker accounts access the Del Monte portal each day.

Once you can see information across the enterprise you may find surprising areas – silos – of information that are either duplicated or you simply didn’t know were there. I found out that I was not using the latest template for writing proposals.

When you’re identifying silos it is time to consider the move from information access to information management; weighing the cost of change against the benefits of increased efficiency and risk mitigation.

If you decide to go further, tackle the questions at the top of the list:

1. Do you have a strategy to achieve your objectives?
2. Do your business processes reflect these?
3. Are they employed by your staff?

When you have business processes that reflect your strategy – a structured meeting of people and information – you have “workflow”. Information Management systems like Sharepoint implement workflow, alerting staff to the tasks they need to carry out as information changes. Version information on information will show who has changed what and when, supporting authorship, review and approval if required. Here it must be said technology is less of a silver bullet than when simply enabling information access – there really is no getting over the fact that the management of information (or lack of it) reflects a working culture and that can be deeply engrained.

Yes, OCC has a written strategy and processes that are our best attempts to reflect them, and for software development we found the workflow was already there. We have our own task tracking databases that impose the right processes. What we did find was that information was not flowing well enough between project teams (e.g. novel ideas for best practice) or between our developers and our administration.

So what about your organisation? Given your strategy, do your business processes reflect it? Are they enacted by your staff? Finally, can your staff access the information they need?

Hopefully this article has shown that establishing true information management where there is none is a difficult task but that the enablement of information access is now readily available and delivers real benefits.