Imagine the future. We experience a single intuitive interface to the content and services that we need and want in our daily lives. We access personalized entertainment, news, information, services and messages easily using the right medium. Our personalized network understands our preferences and the available knowledge base while maintaining our privacy.
Perhaps this feels like a utopian vision - too far into the future to be actionable on today’s management agenda. However, unlike the public Internet, corporations are in control of their information network and can deliver against this vision with their own audiences. Content and services can be filtered and personalized so employees, customers, and partners experience a focused set of information and services. Just-in-time workflows can be triggered for people to achieve excellence in their roles.
Information management delivers significant business value by lowering operating costs and increasing productivity. Companies realize strategic advantage by leveraging their intellectual assets: information and knowledge.
Why is productivity diminishing?
Metcalfe's Law states "The power of the network increases as the square of the number of computers connected to it. Therefore, every computer added to the network both uses it as a resource while adding resources in a spiral of increasing value and choice." This is often cited a key driver for the growth of the Internet. Ebay is one of the the best known examples of this network effect: the more users on Ebay, the more buyers and sellers exist and the more items become available for commerce – spiraling value and choice upwards.
However, Metcalf’s law also contributes to diminishing productivity in information management. Productivity actually declines as more content is made available to more users. This is caused by our limited ability to deal with the spiraling number of choices.
The mountain of information available to us is vast and growing. Google indexes around 3 billion web pages. The deep web is estimated to be 500 times larger. Daily e-mail traffic is measured in billions of messages per day. The web gets searched 625 million times every day. Add telemarketers, spam, radio, TV and newspapers to these channels and the amount of information we see is stifling. Information overload is a daily trial.
Ineffective use of information is a serious problem for business. Information is one of a company’s core assets and source of competitive advantage; however, most companies have not deployed the systems required to effectively deliver knowledge to the knowledge worker. Only a small fraction of information is aimed at useful work. Typical symptoms include:
- 100s of irrelevant e-mails
- intranets that are hard to use
- wasted internet searches
- rising cost of information storage and management.
PA Consulting Group estimates the cost to productivity ranges from a 1% loss in dealing with spam, to as much as a 15% loss in research and analysis.
Why are companies having difficulty organizing and delivering information today?
Three key issues are preventing companies from successfully deploying and effective information network:
The first obstacle is the lack of clear top-down vision and commitment. Many companies have failed to recognize and communicate the priority of a unified information management model preferring instead to allow disparate initiatives and systems to emerge across the enterprise. While there is value in deploying solutions close within business areas, when looked upon as a whole, these disparate systems compound the information management problem and fragment the corporate culture.
The second challenge is in user-centered design. Companies have had mixed success in deploying a personalized user experience. Too often information is organized without an eye toward user intents and without a clear taxonomy or information architecture. Portals, content management and web services technology are important enablers to a personalized user experience and should be adopted as enterprise standards.
Finally, companies are failing to recognize that technology solutions – like websites and portals –only address the visible information management challenge. A successful information network requires that an extensive operating model be in place behind the scenes to organize the publishing process end-to end and manage the systems that support the information management environment.
These issues are worth overcoming and there are many examples2 of companies reaping the rewards of better information management. IBM cut $375M off its annual training budget and $20M in travel expenses by using its intranet to bring teams of people together. It isn’t just technology companies, Mattel cut 20% off its product development time by sharing information more effectively between design and production. Bovis doubled productivity in a gas station renovation program by planning more effectively. Bovis put its information on-line and shared it between builders, architects and suppliers.
No two companies are identical and information needs are also differernt. There is not a single formula for technology or information management that can be applied across the board.
How should companies deploy an effective information network?
IM leaders follow a logical process that begins with a top-down information management strategy and provides a user-centered experience in a sustainable operating environment.
Define a top-down information management strategy
A successful information management strategy can help orchestrate the users and uses of information into a workable system directed towards the strategic aims of the organization. A top-down information management strategy addresses information value, delivery channels and information culture.
Information Value - Information must be prioritized based on value and the single aim of an information management strategy is to improve business performance by using information more effectively. Information management deployments should be prioritized around critical processes and high reach/frequency content and services.
Information Delivery - Effective information delivery channels support the flow of information, distributing it to where it can be used most effectively. Information delivery channels must be rationalized to balance the needs of the individual against the organization as a whole.
Information Culture - Often the best channel for information delivery is through people not technology and policies to discourage the use of emails or instant messaging where a simple phone call or conversation will work have been adopted. The ownership and governance of information and delivery systems is critical, as a unified experience for users is difficult to achieve if managers resist sharing information or rationalizing delivery systems.
A large pharmaceutical company recently started to converge over 10,000 web sites in order to provide a much smaller number of information sources for their users and realize over $19 million in benefits.
Design a user-centered experience
A user-centered experience is a addresses the intents of the user through personalization and provides a clear taxonomy or information architecture.
Personalization - Personalized networks that are sensitive to the role and intents of the user are increasingly important. Developing the right user experience requires careful analysis of the user audience and their true intent when interacting with the service. Personas bring personalization to the user analysis. Intents are mapped to each user segment and prioritized based on its importance to the user and the ability to deliver business value. Effective visual design and branding help complete the experience.
Information Architecture - Productive information search and analysis requires an overall taxonomy and organized information that enables efficient navigation and search. The architectural design should consider the range of functionality, security and delivery performance of the application or service. Advanced content management, web services, search engines and portal functionality provide opportunities to customize and personalize the user experience enabling the user to more effectively manage his or her own information management experience.
A large networking technology provider found that to gain true insights on user intents for a customer service portal, interviewing customer and support representatives was insufficient. They had to perform in-depth analysis of customer problem tickets to uncover the true intent of the user.
Deploy a sustainable information environment
A sustainable information environment requires an integrated technology platform supported by an operating model that provides standard processes and information governance.
Technical Implementation - The choice between building a new information network and providing direct access to existing systems is a fundamental decision for deployment. Factors such as time to deploy, maintenance, administration, duplication, redundancy and interoperability must be considered when making this decision. It is important to note that the technical solution is not limited to the visible information management components (i.e. websites and portals) but also the back end processing systems and data stores.
Operating Model – The operating model ensures that business processes for content management and administration, technology deployment, and stakeholder management are in place to effectively operate the information network. It provides the governance structure that encourages enterprise-wide coordination and a unified outlook for dealing with the whole information lifecycle from acquisition/creation, storage, retrieval, communication, processing, and utilization through to destruction.
A fortune 30 company deployed an B2E portal for over 40,000 users. To sustain the operation, the company organized a 50-person portal team to govern the service and manage content migration, functional deployment, customer service, training and communications.
What can you do next?
You may already have a good feel for how effective your information network is. Do you run an efficient personalized information network geared toward productivity or is it a tangle of disconnected information? How do we assess its effectiveness? Start by taking the pulse of your network and measuring how much you can do to transform it into a source of competitive advantage.
A simple self assessment can illustrate, as above, where the strengths and weaknesses are in the current network. Guide the assessment toward the business processes that will benefit most from more effective information. Determine the dimensions that have most impact and seek out quick wins for the business. Experience shows that assessing preferences is the best means to prioritize abstract information needs and One Page Strategy analysis excels at capturing and communicating the strategy.
Armed with these tools and insight, you can tailor your strategy, design and deployment to achieve a sustainable information network that continually satisfies your information need.
