Posts Tagged ‘information management’
Information Management in the 21st Century
This post is from a keynote speech I gave to a room of Information Managers at a corporate function for Codice, a specialist IM Consulting Services company based in Brisbane, Australia. When I read it over, it seemed like a nice blog post — I decided I like the way I write speeches much better than the way I deliver them!
Thanks so much for taking the time to be with us this evening.
Now, I know the main reason we’re here is to have a drink and catch up with each other and gossip, and I’ll let you get back to that soon. But I just wanted to steal a little of your time to talk about three things that have been bugging me about information management in the 21st century.
When I was a boy, I wanted to be a teacher… or a fireman… and sometimes an astronaut… and a cowboy. Oh, and the guy who reads the news…
Nowadays, I have trouble explaining what it is I do to my kids.
In fact, I overheard my son talking to one of his friends about me the other day:
“My Dad is over there” he pointed. “He’s a computer nerd.”
And I guess that’s true, in some sense — I am. So, he’s right. But let’s face it, job titles aren’t what they used to be. (Nobody ever handed me a business card with “Cowboy” written on it.) And it’s getting harder to explain what we do to our kids.
As people who care about information management this curious fact should be very important to us:
The way people work is changing.
There are less and less menial jobs as a percentage of the global economy. More and more people are creating information for a living. They’re getting paid to think stuff. And enter it into some computer. And then to do stuff with the stuff they’ve thought up and stored. As a result, the amount of information is increasing.
Okay, so this is something that, in our field, we hear all the time — oh help, we’re sucking on the end of a firehose, information overload! Sales guys love to tell that story. So I’m not going to bore you with it again. But we should all be aware that this trend is occurring — if nothing else, it means a lot more work for us all to do.
The second thing is this:
The mediums that people are using have changed.
The young people who are joining the workforce today are steeped in information.
But the way they see and interact with that information is different — they’ve grown up with Facebook and Twitter and SMS. They think that email is lame. They think that paper is old-fashioned, and harmful to the environment. They are used to being able to reply to any piece of information they see. They share things much more freely, and thrive when given autonomy and freedom — two things that often aren’t exactly the hallmarks of many workplaces.
As Information Managers, we need to understand these mediums and these ways of thinking. We have to be able to manage, preserve, track and harness the content in these systems. They’re not going away.
This brings me to my other third thing:
What people expect from their systems has changed.
When I was at Elementary School, my school librarian was a lady called Mrs Gamble. She must have been about 85, and she was the sweetest thing. (As a fledgling nerd, she and I spent quite a bit of time together.) But there was one way to make her turn absolutely purple — put a book back on the wrong shelf. This heinous crime was punishable by a 10-minute lecture on the Dewey Decimal System, and the importance of proper filing of books so they could be accurately recalled by others.
“Do NOT!” She would shriek, “Ever put a book on the wrong SHELF!”
Thirty years later , Google came along and completely wrecked the world of information management. All of a sudden, in a wholly electronic world, the problem wasn’t that the book was on the wrong shelf. The problem was shelves. (Mrs Gamble would turn in her grave.) Google took a completely different approach to our established concepts of taxonomy, ontology and organization. Managing electronic information means that our old physical approaches could be re-thought. People have preconceived notions of of how information systems ought to behave, because they use them daily in their lives.
So:
- The way people work is changing.
- The mediums that people are using have changed.
- What people expect from information systems has changed.
Delivering Information Management solutions into this landscape is challenging. But the potential rewards and motivation are greater than ever.
And we would love to be able to help you, if we can.
Thanks : )
The Promise of Information Management
I asked a customer the other day why they were running an Information Management project. Her answer was refreshingly honest:
“I’m not exactly sure,” she said, “It just seems like the responsible thing to do.”
It was a great answer, and it got me thinking about The Promise of Information Management. Why are people doing this stuff? What is it that IM tools and technologies are really designed for? In my experience, the hierarchy of needs for Information Management looks something like this, with each need requiring fulfillment from the bottom up:
The Conventional Hierarchy of IM Needs
At the bottom, there’s the mitigation of risk. Effectively managed information lowers the likelihood of bad things happening to your information, and as a consequence, to your organization. Compliance is still the most common driver for people to invest in Information Management. That’s hardly a surprise since it’s the responsible thing to do. Any organization that faces public scrutiny needs to classify and control its information and implement consistent retention policies.
Higher up the pyramid, we encounter the reduction of cost. If we store our information effectively, we can spend less money storing things we don’t need. We can also recoup time spent on re-creating things we didn’t know existed. There are many ways that effective information management can reduce costs. (These are inevitably the things that end up in all the business cases, under the ROI section.)
Finally, at the pinnacle, there’s the incentive to innovate and to improve the way the organization functions — the ability to meet and exceed performance metrics and offer better solutions to customers, internal and external. Improved awareness, and greater access to knowledge. The benefits of efficient management of information result in people doing better business.
Inverting the pyramid
While these three tiers constitute the promise of information management, the reality is that the needs of knowledge workers are not being met by current IM solutions. Nearly all of the tools designed to manage information will be sold based on the benefits of improved productivity or designing better business process — but in fact are designed primarily to fulfill risk mitigation and/or cost savings. As an ECM consultant, I had to reconcile this bait-and-switch on a daily basis.
With Infovark Personal Edition now perilously close to its first public release, I find myself trying to determine how our new product fits into this information management promise. We’ve turned the pyramid upside down. We put innovation and knowledge awareness right at the bottom, as the platform that everything else is built on. Infovark contributes to cost saving only incidentally (our peer architecture doesn’t require any new servers or centralized storage) and we’ve actively removed a lot of the control, security and access barriers that compliance-oriented solutions offer.
The Infovark Hierarchy of IM Needs
We feel this aligns better with what the vast majority of business people actually need. Most knowledge workers don’t seem to care much about compliance or retention. That’s a management concern. They also seem largely uninterested in cost control. What we hear from people working with information daily is that they want an authoritative source of reliable information, the answers when they need them, and a way to learn what they don’t yet know. They focus on the revenue side of the equation, on pursuing opportunities, on delivering value.
What IM has traditionally seen as base level needs — retention, security and control — we at Infovark see as advanced needs that can be addressed only once we have first fulfilled the more pressing needs of the individuals within the organization. You have to increase transparency and information awareness first, then optimize the way information flows, and only afterward can we look at what risk mitigation policies makes sense.
Yeah, the management team might not buy this approach. But we think everyone else will.
Review: Keeping Found Things Found
I recently finished Keeping Found Things Found by William Jones. It’s subtitled “The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management” but I think it ought to read “The Study of a Practice…”
The book is intended as a broad survey of information management practices and principles that individuals use to manage information. This is not a how-to manual or a self-help guide. It’s written in the style of an introductory textbook, which is not surprising given that much of the content was developed as part of the Keeping Found Things Found Project, run by the Information School at the University of Washington.
The academic style of the writing might appeal to some, but I found it a slow read. The footnotes and citations often got in my way as I was trying to absorb the material. Each chapter begins with a lengthy introduction and ends with a point-by-point recapitulation of key messages. These are probably useful for a semester-long course, but it’s overkill for anyone wanting tips and tricks.
Your mileage may vary, of course. I’m not the target audience for a book like this. If you want a primer on the personal information management field, Keeping Found Things Found is a decent place to start.
Key messages
We live in a world awash with information. Some of it is useful to us, but much of it isn’t. The point of information management is to keep the useful information easily accessible while ignoring the unhelpful bits.
This is an extremely challenging task, because we use information in a variety of different ways depending on our current situation. It also requires us to make some guesses about the future. How likely is it that we will need to recall or retrieve the information again? Is it worth memorizing it? Writing it down? Saving a hyperlink or adding a bookmark to our browser? We can’t predict our future needs exactly, so we often wind up storing more information than we need.
And that leads us to develop strategies for organizing it, indexing it, and searching it. And because we’re all different, there are almost as many different methods for keeping found things found as there are people. Some of the strategies — like the post-it notes stuck to your monitor — are obvious. Others are subtle, like keeping a mental list of go-to people that are experts in a particular topic so that you can ask questions as needed.
How this relates to Infovark
Having recently worked at a firm making records management software, I was familiar with much of the material in the book. The main reason for reading it was that records management focuses on large-scale organizational methods used by government and corporations to store, track, manage and dispose of information. I wanted to find out whether there were specific strategies that work well for individuals or small teams. Were there methods or tools that might help us refine Infovark’s design?
Well, I didn’t spot any, though some of the sources cited in the book might be worth checking out.
One of the book’s themes that connected with me was that we are really operating in a different age. The amount of information available to people is orders of magnitude greater today than in the past. Many of us now have music collections on our iPods that would have put independent record shops a few decades ago to shame. We have vast amounts of movies, television, and other video available to us on DVDs and streamed across the Internet. And then there’s the mountains of text and reams of financial data. All this content means that we’ve outgrown many of the concepts that guided us and tools we used in the past.
Gordon and I saw this clearly in our old job. It seemed silly — ridiculous, even — to expect a large organization to get a handle on its information when most of its employees have difficulty dealing with their own email inboxes. And companies can’t afford to train all their staff in the ways of research librarians so that they can manage the stuff on the corporate intranet. We need new approaches.
And we’ll keep reading, and talking with people, and attending conferences, and scouring the Internet, until we find them.
