Our Friday breakfast discussions highlighted the importance of online content strategy being understood and supported by everyone in an organisation, in particular at CEO and board level. Information, unlike a warehouse full of product or work in progress, is invisible and often not recognised or valued as asset. In the current climate the easily recognised costs of organised access to information are often being cut (the information managers) thus indirectly adding to the cost of ensuring that those who need it can find and identify the appropriate information. This becomes even more difficult in a global organisation where the cultures may differ and local management have a differing view. Corporate memory is an eroded value asset.
Equally having a sound information or online content strategy can bring benefits that outstrip information forced into an IT infrastructure that doesn't always fit the need of the users or the organisation. One delegate mentioned that the corporate ethos of "make search work" was somewhat at odds with several thousand users developing their own mini libraries on local servers without understanding the need for globalised sharing. This led another delegate to make the point that in their company people only admit where their information stored is if it appears they may lose it or lose access to it.
Risk is always an issue. Users expect the keepers to circumvent the rules put in place by IT or even to try and bypass contractual limitations. The security of information in the cloud was seen as uncertain - sanctioned by some employers and feared by others. Social Media is still blocked in certain types of organisation and consequently people use their own personal devices more and more. This is something that mobile and home working tends to take advantage off. Providing accessible access to internal information but encouraging staff to provide their own space, PCs and devices cuts overheads whilst at the same time giving risk management a higher profile as organisations try and balance security, access and reputational management.
Intriguingly cultures differ within the same types of organisations and recent co-operation between public organisations has brought that into perspective. Of three local authorities moving to shared services one has everything outsourced, directly opposite to another where everything is done in-house whilst the third has a mix of both. Change needs driving from the top down but you often still need information people to make sense of it.
Above all the ability to make a decision (be it right or wrong) is vital as failure to make decisions invariably causes damage and can stall progress. In a tracked programme of change, four months of 13 months was attributed to failure to make appropriate decisions. A valuable aid going forward has been to run risk registers alongside the process thus facilitating better decision making.
Asking delegates present to outline the biggest changes they had seen in the last five years brought forth growing user expectations, outsourcing (justification and value), mobile technologies, ways of working, lack of boundaries, globalisation ideology and keeping up with the pace of technological development and concepts. The final comment brought a wry smile from all those present; "SharePoint is not the answer!"
Sue H
