As businesses and organisations are suddenly realising that they need to harness their information in order to have the competitive edge, Vivienne Winterman affirms the fundamental building blocks for good information management – and the message isn’t a new one.
Information management (IM) is (one of) the latest term(s) latched onto by senior managers and heads of organisations to describe how they think their businesses and organisations could work smarter, diversify, increase their profits and be more sustainable. Some see it as a new concept. It just depends on your frame of reference.
The past
Go back 20 or 30 years. Businesses worked largely by functional areas, sometimes independent of each other. There was little collaboration or networking and ‘knowledge is power’ was the maxim. Work was often duplicated. There was little learning across an organisation. Information, books, journals, online information belonged in the library, curated by the librarian or information manager. If you needed facts and figures you sought out the librarian to find it for you. Information was seen as the ‘written word’ shared in reports and business meetings.
The present
Today of course, the picture is very different. The web has changed the volumes of information available at our fingertips. Digitisation is the future. Facebook and Twitter have enabled instant conversations and communication of information to large audiences without ever having to speak a word. Businesses and organisations have realised that unless they harness and qualify what information is available in-house, never mind on the outside, they will not be able to leverage and maximise their resources, be productive and have the competitive edge. In particular, the public sector with its austerity measures and severe cutbacks in budgets, has been forced to examine the use of their resources and costs to see how economies can be made often resulting in selling off expensive offices and staff redundancies.
The realisation that information is a key and pivotal resource to an organisation has suddenly moved up the agenda. Not that businesses were unaware, but had just not addressed the scope and impact accurate and timely information has on business performance and meeting targets.
‘Information management’ applies to the whole lifecycle of information (and beyond) namely:
- Archives – historical records of an organisation often of relevant or topical value.
- Records – documents upheld as evidence of business activities and transactions.
- Data – facts, statistics, evidence, customer databases used in knowledge gathering and decision making.
- Knowledge – the know-how, information that is in people’s heads, ‘how things are done’.
- Social networking – the contacts, people to follow, networks, what’s going on, web presence.
Information problems in organisations
The cry of ‘what we need is an information manager’ is to be heard echoing down the corridors. ‘I am here’ says the librarian, synonymous with the information manager. The information professional has been around for many, many years. Their cry for better information management has often gone unheeded. The information problems inherent in all organisations have been, are and will be the same. These include:
- What information is required to do your job?
- Where do you get it from?
- What problems are there in accessing this information?
- Who do you need to share information with/network (receiving and giving)?
Information managers have been asking these questions and listening to the responses to develop information systems, databases, collections of information, networks to centralise, improve the accessibility to and sharing of the information and knowledge of an organisation. It’s not an easy task. The questions have remained the same but the solutions have advanced. Developments in IT and communication have virtually changed the face of information access and exchange. ‘Lotus Notes’ was once the software but now ‘Sharepoint’ has its turn.
CDs brought vast amounts of information but now it has moved to the Cloud, while over on Twitter, tweets may contain that nugget of information so long searched for.
An organisation needs a centralised place where its staff can access a cohort of accurate and timely information (of all types) which can be navigated by topic, theme, department, team etc. usually via an intranet. The success of any system is judged not by finding the information the first time, but finding it on subsequent occasions as well!
The tools for good IM
However as digitisation becomes the norm, and technology and accessibility evolve, there will always be certain building blocks which are fundamental to develop and sustain good information management. These include:
1. Information managers – a professional information manager and team who have the expertise and skills to:
- Work at the very highest level of the organisation to advocate, explain and get the buy-in for good IM.
- Integrate and work at all levels of the organisation and be part of boards/projects/teams.
- Maintain an information strategy that supports the business objectives.
- Understand user needs to specify the requirements of an IM system, in particular: its information architecture (taxonomy, classification and tagging of items); information governance; user interface to include several means of navigation, search and retrieval; security levels.
- Set up appropriate networks, partnerships and lines of communication internally and externally.
- Develop the information literacy skills of the workforce.
- Provide training and support so that end-users can become self sufficient in their knowledge, information and information- management related tasks.
- Be a visible and constant foundation throughout the organisation.
- Purchase appropriate resources of data, information and current awareness.
- Provide value added and innovative services to share and learn from knowledge, information and data across the organisation.
2. IT – an IT team who will work with the Information team to:
- Develop the most appropriate information systems with the required functionality.
- Ensure that the same information architecture, and governance, can be applied to all data sets and information collections; to increase digitisation and aggregation; provide federated searching across a number of resources and improve accessibility.
- Support staff/rectify any IT and communication problems with regard to the accessibility of information.
3. Processes – as part of good information management there needs to be:
- Common, enterprise-wide processes for saving documents and important information.
- Procedures for tagging items with appropriate keywords.
- Guidelines for where to conserve different types of data, information and knowledge.
- Mechanisms to alert other people to new information in their areas of interest.
These will be part of the information literacy training given by the professional staff as well as help on:
- Good information search and retrieval.
- Using internal information systems.
- Searching on the web.
4. The workforce – Good information management is not just the responsibility of the information manager and team. It is the responsibility of every employee in the organisation. The skills required for managing information should be part of the skills list for that job, and the work of managing information part of the tasks of the job specification.
5. Senior Management – The success of outstanding information management will be due to the vision, tenacity and belief of the head and directors of the organisation. Their lead will promote and embed the information-sharing culture required to underpin their business operation. Without this, the organisation will have difficulty in developing a market edge and providing the high levels of service necessary to maintain success in these times of austerity, restricted resources and cutbacks in spending.
The bottom line
- Information accessible in a timely and accurate manner is the key resource for a business to grow and prosper.
- Information management is the key to access information efficiently and expediently.
- Information managers are the key people to make this happen.
PS These words have been penned numerous times in knowledge and information management consultancy reports over the last 25 years for public, private and not-for-profit sector organisations, large and small, national and international.
Hindsight? Head start? Or both?
Update magazine
This article was originally published in CILIP Update Magazine, February 2016).
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