The information age
It’s the information age: most of the intelligent work-force of the developed world spends most of its time writing, reading and manipulating documents and other data. Most businesses and organizations are therefore knowledge-based or, more accurately, information-based.
This means that information – in the abstract – is their most important resource.
However, it is not treated as such; instead the focus is on other resources (such as people or equipment), information technology, individual items of information, or the subject of the information.
Individuals are left to their own devices, teams do not work together effectively or efficiently, and the overall business is disfunctional. Information, as a whole and in itself, is just not managed.
Managing information
For information-based businesses, the majority in a developed country, this is a serious failure of management within the organization. The main reason is that managers are not well-educated enough to understand something as abstract as information. The solution is to re-engineer the business around its information: to understand it, to categorize and structure it, to standardize it, and to control it.
It is also necessary to modify the behaviours and activities of everyone in the business to work with this newly-structured and contolled information, and, in particular, for managers to be managing information as their main activity. This doesn’t mean managing individual pieces of information or the people working with information, it means directly managing the abstracted information about the information, i.e. the information structures and flows and people’s relationship to this.
Information, transformation
So, there are two main challenges: firstly, some deep and difficult thinking about the information used by the business; secondly, radically changing the business, its information structures, controls and systems, and the people who work in it.
For an information-based organization this will be a much larger challenge than anything it has ever attempted before, and very difficult and very costly. It is absolutely not something to be done on the cheap, and it is not a challenge that can be solved by technology; information technology will be involved, but this entirely secondary and relatively unimportant.
The rewards for making the change are a huge competitive advantage: the ability to effectively and efficiently leverage information. This dramatically increases the value of a company’s main asset – its information. The experience of customers, suppliers and partners improves, and the risk of costly mistakes reduces.
The business finally gets good at what it does.