Managing information, opportunities and the role of info pros
Jinfo Blog

By Martin White

Abstract

You probably feel you have a good sense of the assets of your organisation. However most organisations actually have no idea about how much information they have stored away, because no one has bothered to track it down and count it. This year one of my clients discovered they owned 45TB of information contained in 6000 Lotus Notes databases, but had no way of searching this vast repository. We worked out that staff time being wasted in creating information that no one could find was around €150Million a year. That was the equivalent of building 10 new factories!

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You probably feel you have a good sense of the assets of your organisation. You know how many employees there are because they are all in an HR database. You know the sales you made last month because they are in the Sales Ledger database. You know how many items you have in stock because they are all in an ERP database. You know the financial resources you have from the accounts department. At the end of the year all these databases will be queried and massaged to produce the information for the annual accounts.

However what about the information you hold in documents, reports, drawings, photographs, videos, emails, blogs and wikis, not to mention your websites? This information is also an asset of the organisation, but do you know how much you have and where it is? Much of it will be in shared drives and in email servers. More will be in document management systems and records management systems. Then there are the customer management system and the visit reports in the service management system.

Most organisations have no idea about how much information they have stored away, because no one has bothered to track it down and count it. This year one of my clients discovered they owned 45TB of information contained in 6000 Lotus Notes databases, but had no way of searching this vast repository. We worked out that staff time being wasted in creating information that no one could find was around €150Million a year. That was the equivalent of building 10 new factories!

In June 2011, the McKinsey Global Institute published a major report entitled "Big Data; The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition and Productivity". Much of the McKinsey report is about how companies and other organisations and policy makers need to address considerable challenges if they are to capture the full potential of big data. A shortage of the analytical and managerial talent necessary to make the most of big data is a significant and pressing challenge and one that companies and policy makers can begin to address in the near term. The United States alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with what McKinsey refer to as deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts to analyse big data and make decisions based on their findings. That’s quite a career opportunity.

Of concern to me is that, as far as I can see, none of the prominent societies and organisations that support information professionals, is focusing on the wider issue of information management. Organisations need to be making the best possible decisions based on the best possible information and, as information professionals, we need to start finding innovative ways of supporting the thousands of people who need to manage information professionally and yet will never see themselves as information professionals.

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