Part of The Beginning and The End of Information Management.
Introduction
“The Beginning and The End of Information Management”
Information management is big news at the moment. Put simply, information management is the strategic management of information to ensure it is captured, maintained, and used as required by your organisation’s strategic intent.
If you’ve already been put off by the fact I used “information” and “management” in my definition of “information management”, or that I used “strategic” twice, you’re probably not going to enjoy running an information management initiative.
I can’t think of any reason why you’d want to read this book if you aren’t trying to lead an information management initiative. It’s not a general audience book. But it does try to both introduce you to the concepts of information management while at the same time looking at the subject in a slightly different way.
This book hopes to arm you with some ideas that will help you lead your initiative. But if you’ve never been involved in an information management initiative before you might not notice when I’m trying to help you. I’ll try, but you might still end up taking your initiative down a wrong turn and wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars. But now you can blame me.
The good news is these initiatives tend to take a long time, particularly when managed poorly, so by the time you’ve finished you might understand where I’m coming from. You’ll be ready for next time at least. At that point, just try not to come across as a know-it-all, like I fear I am now.
There are at least three ways I view us being at both “the beginning” and “the end” of information management and therefore why I’ve included this in the title of this book.
Firstly, I think the fact that we need information management initiatives is an anomaly. It’s bizarre when you think about it. We all know what information is, and we use it every day. So why a special program to manage it? Why haven’t we been naturally incorporating what we know about the economics of information into our change programs and improvement initiatives?
I think I know what happened, some of which I discuss in this book. In brief, the discipline of general management, which was largely about telling people what to do, suddenly stopped working when information technology started being incorporated into the design of our organisations.
While we noticed the big impacts of information technology, we didn’t notice other subtle shifts. So while general management stopped working immediately, the impact on our organisations took decades. This 30-Year-Drift caused us to confuse “details” in general with “technical details”. There are a lot of details to consider during an information management initiative, but they aren’t all “technical”.
Conflating these concepts caused a drift of responsibilities into I.T. departments that they never fully embraced. Even when I.T. departments tried to embrace these new responsibilities, other trends such as outsourcing accidentally eliminated the associated capabilities as not core to I.T.
When we are starting an information management initiative, at “the beginning” so to speak, we must first address this drift.
But we’re also at “the end” of this problem. Indeed, if you are only just starting your information management initiative now you’ve already started too late. It’s likely that your competitors are way ahead of you by this point. This is “the end” in terms of being able to obtain any competative advantage by merely addressing this drift.
Like all late starters, and smart second-movers, you also have an opportunity to learn from both the failures and the successes of others. Where this book takes a different approach it is to try and help you leap-frog those who have come before you.
Our second “beginning and end” refers to the way we think of information management frameworks. At the beginning of your information management initiative you will adopt an information management framework. This book includes the barest bones of such a framework (though I’d claim it is sufficient to get you started if you have nothing else).
But in my view of how to implement an information management framework you have to think of this initial framework as something very different to the framework you will eventually build. You need to use this generic, starting point, information management framework at “the beginning” to build your actual information management framework.
This isn’t just a matter of customising, or picking-and-chosing elements of the framework; and this is why the initial framework doesn’t have to be particularly comprehensive. Instead it’s about using the initial framework to generate a framework specific to the needs of your organisation.
Notice I said “the needs of your organisation”, not “the needs of your stakeholders” or “business requirements”. I’m talking about things that are fundamental to how you operate as a business. These need to be discovered, not pushed to somebody else to define so we can tick them off a list.
Under this approach there is a very real difference between the framework at “the beginning” and the framework at “the end”.
Thirdly, and this is personal, I’ve spent about half of my career involved in information management. Sometimes this has been in the context of technology roles, sometimes as part of major programs and business transformations, and of course I’ve lead many information management initiatives.
To me, I see information management as in my past. I’m at the end of understanding our organisations as the sum of their information life-cycles. This book represents my aging views of what I expect from the information management initiatives I encounter rather than what I’d like to actually be doing.
But with every end comes a new beginning. So for me this is the beginning of helping others get their information management initiatives right, and a time to look from the outside in as a consumer and stakeholder of information management initiatives as I enjoy the next phase of my career.