Information overload

One of the biggest problems facing organisations today is the sheer amount of information, received and created that has to be catalogued and securely shared. According to IDC and Delphi Consulting, 80% or more of a company’s content still resides in unstructured data and much of it is still on paper.

Quite simply, the problem is that without a structured approach to information management your organisation will constantly be relearning what many within the organisation already know. Common symptoms are duplication of effort caused by a lack of knowledge sharing and lengthy waits for access to information. Organisations especially affected are those with large volumes of specialist documents such as financial and legal firms, engineering and pharmaceutical companies.

Information is created and delivered in many guises: paper; microfilm; data; voice to name a few and in many formats: (A4; legal; A0), (16mm; 35mm film; fiche; aperture card), (txt; bmp; gif) more commonly we know them as our archive; e-mail; fax; scanned image; spreadsheet files – all of which have to be structured and made available. There is no doubt that we communicate more often and in an ever-increasing number of ways therefore information management will play an even more critical role in the future. The paperless office by the year 2000 – seems laughable now but it is reducing in percentage as a mode of delivery simply because we are being bombarded by information in the electronic form.

Technology has been at hand to assist for sometime now under a variety of headings including: Knowledge Management; Content Management and Document Management – albeit at a hefty price. Today however, recent product releases has seen the cost of this type of technology tumble so much so that it is now affordable for small to medium sized businesses. These products generally function on standard computer equipment found in most offices so the only additional computer hardware you will require will be a scanner, if you’ve not already got one.

I am constantly being asked to cost justify systems of this nature. It’s simple, just calculate the time taken to retrieve information and then the time to re-file; the number of times this operation is performed daily, work it out over a year then calculate the cost as a percentage of your salary. Now do an average for all staff across the organisation. Yes it’s rough and ready so reduce it by half and you can still justify a system. This of course does not take into account distribution costs; printing; printer sundries; paper, storage et al.

There is no doubt that knowledge is one of the most important assets a company has and properly controlled it can play an extremely significant role in improving competitive advantage; customer focus; employee development and revenue growth and profit (KPMG Knowledge Management Research Report 2000).

If your company is suffering from information overload perhaps now is the time to consider the implementation of a Knowledge Management solution. If so, any system you consider implementing should, amongst others:

• be available to all employees. You may even wish to consider your customers and dare I mention the general public  - why not, you give them access to your web site! or don’t you have one?
• provide quick and easy access to all information to which the researcher is entitled to view
• offer an English type search facility along with other means of retrieval
• be able to be accessed from anywhere (home; regional office etc.) by way of industry standard browser technology
• accommodate different file formats (e-mails; faxes; scanned images; computer reports) There are many hundreds of formats.
• be secure at both document and user level so that only those entitled to view the documents can do so. In this way you can have the same approach for confidential material in the knowledge that it will remain so.
• operate on industry standard office computer operating systems such as Windows and UNIX. If not you’ll find that proprietary systems cost more in the long run (stick to the standards).
• but most of all the product should be user friendly and intuitive. This will ease implementation whilst going a long way to ensuring that the system is readily adopted by your staff.

Once you have purchased your chosen solution select a pilot area and expand from there and for Pete’s sake don’t choose an area that affects everyone – just in case there are initial teething problems otherwise your staff will be against the new system before it even gets started in earnest.

You will also have to consider what you will do with your archive – or is that just too much to bear! Perhaps drip feeding them into the system as and when they become active would ease the pain – just a thought. Whatever your approach a single secure gateway for all information is the way forward. That way everyone knows precisely where to go to find the information they need in order to learn/perform the task at hand. Remember, if you can find it you won’t have to re-create it.

The end result will be that you will be more responsive to your customers and your staff will be better informed. With all information available on the desktop just think of the savings in time not having to get information out of storage or the filing cabinet and then having to re-file it or for that matter getting a copy of that file from someone else’s PC.

One last comment:

“No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future” (Ian E Wilson) – agreed, lets all get to the point where we know what we know.

OK, now you can file my report in the usual repository!

Dave MacGregor, Director, Benefit Systems Limited   e-mail: davem@the-document-services-company.co.uk