Archives for Information management

The real cost of email in organisations.

Much has been written about the impact of 'email overload', in terms of the productivity cost and impact on attention spans for staff. There is another very real cost of the reliance on email: the duplication of information management activities. 'All staff' emails are often used to send out new policies and procedures, product updates and other changes. These can range from a few paragraph to 50 pages, and it is left for each staff member to keep track of this information. In an organisation of 1,000 staff, this leads to the effort of managing these updates being multiplied by

The real cost of email in organisations.

There is very real cost of the reliance on email: the duplication of information management activities, which has a significant impact on productivity, consistency and…

Taking a business-centric approach to portals.

Enterprise portals (generally known as just 'portals') rose to prominence several years ago. Complementing or replacing earlier technologies, portals promise to deliver a more coherent information management platform, and a more seamless user experience for staff. Now that the early hype has died down, it is not surprising to find that portals are not a 'silver bullet' solution to all the information delivery challenges within organisations. Like all technologies, portals have their strengths and weaknesses. These need to be well understood if they are to be successfully implemented within businesses. This article outlines the characteristics (good and bad) of enterprise

Grand enterprise projects: why are we wasting our time?.

The need for improvements in information management systems and practices within organisations is great. Spend half a day talking with a random selection of staff, and the list of desirable fixes and enhancements will be lengthy. Whether it is the need to log into three different applications to complete a single task, or the filling out of a poorly-designed paper form where an electronic one would work better. Staff are struggling to do their jobs, and we are not providing them with good tools or systems to help in their day-to-day tasks. So my question is: why are we wasting

Managing key information.

There are several key categories of documents that should be targeted as part of information management projects, while other documents can be ignored.

Managing key information.

When planning an information management strategy, there can be an overwhelming volume of documents and other content to address. Within even a single business unit of a typical organisation, thousands of documents are created in a given year. While it would be desirable to have all of these managed to the same high level, this is clearly impractical. In practice, however, there are certain types of documents that need to be managed more tightly, while others can be ignored (at least in the short term). This briefing identifies some key categories of documents that should be targeted as part of

Three levels of information management.

Information must be managed on three levels within an organisation: corporate, team and individual. Tools and processes must be provided for each of the levels.