A couple of good postings about information overload have come my way via Alex's blog. Anne 2.0:
… you keep seeing the same blogs with different posts about the same topic or the same posts but linked by different bloggers or different posts by different bloggers that contain almost exactly the same information. … you need some sort of summary that ensures that you see the important stuff at least once and only once. We're a long way from something like that but it's not too much to expect that in 2006 we'll take a step beyond simplistic aggregators.
And see, too, Connecting the Dots. River of news aggregators, social smart aggregation …
Then I came across Elizabeth Daniel (Professor of Information Management, Open University Business School):
It is estimated that the average knowledge worker spends around 10% of their working time trying to find the information within their organization that they need to do their job.
These difficulties are caused by:
- too much information, much of which is often out of date;
- too little information about what is really important to the organization;
- conflicting information.
The key to success, she argues, is to ensure 'that the organization is collecting and maintaining the right information in the first place'. And how should an organisation manage all this information?
The 5 principles of information management are:
- Ownership. All information within the organization should be assigned an owner and that owner’s name should be displayed with the information. Effective stewardship of that information should form part of the individual’s annual appraisal.
- Identification. The owner should also be responsible for labelling or tagging the information so that it can be classified and most importantly easily retrieved by anyone seeking that information.
- Lifecycle. As with other assets, information has a finite life. All information should therefore be reviewed at pre-agreed intervals and archived when no longer current.
- Storage. Considerations for information storage should include ease of access by relevant staff – ‘store once, use many’ being the maxim of many organizations – as well as issues of security and business continuity.
- Audit. Finally, organizations should regularly review their use of information including cost and value.
As these principles illustrate, information management is as much about people and processes as about technology.
Wow! These principles would stir things up in every school I know.
On enterprise portals ('one strand of my own research over the last few years'), she says:
Enterprise portals seek to do what consumer portals and search engines such as Google do on the internet, that is provide easy access to a multitude of information, but within a single organization. Enterprise portals can tailor the information presented to staff according to their interests and responsibilities. The relative ease with which other programs or applications can be integrated into enterprise portals ensures that it is not only static information that can be presented to staff. Information from applications such as customer databases, accounting systems and purchasing systems can all be presented through the portal. This feature allows staff who are unfamiliar with the underlying applications to easily access the information they need.
I hadn't appreciated how Google is moving in on the enterprise area: Daniel links to this IT Week article.
Technorati tags: information, Google, enterprise portals, river of news
