Weapons for infopros
Jinfo Blog

11th December 2007

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Although premium public domain content remains an especial concern of business information professionals, it actually seems to be contributing less and less to the mix – or should one say ‘mash’? While this may sow seeds of alarm among some, the upside is that CEOs and boards are being made ever more aware of the need to manage their information assets proactively – all of them. Take Sarbanes-Oxley, the US legislation imposing strict controls on companies’ reporting responsibilities. According to an article by Larry Gordon and Martin Loeb of the University of Maryland’s Robert H Smith School of Business, published in the Journal of Accounting & Public Policy last September, one of SOX’s unintended side effects is the increasing voluntary disclosure by companies of the information security measures they have taken. The authors believe http://www.rhsmith-umd.cn/SBI/SmithinPrint/print27 that this may be a firm’s way of signalling the importance it attaches to information security. But they still don’t think companies are investing sufficiently in it – a view partially backed up by a more recent report from the Economist Intelligence Unit. ‘Despite an abundance of data, knowledge workers continue to struggle to locate the information they need in a timely manner,’ says Enterprise Knowledge Workers: Understanding Risks and Opportunities, a free EIU research study sponsored by business software provider SAP http://digbig.com/4wdba (1.93 meg). As a result, more than 70% admit to finding ‘workarounds’ to pull together the data they require, up to three quarters of which can be unstructured, residing not in authored and edited documents but in e-mails, Word files and other tools. Scarily, the efforts of these well intentioned employees can pose risks, EIU suggests, including improper accounting or reporting practices, failure to meet regulatory compliance standards, and even security breaches. Intriguingly, too, they ‘choose their means of data search, access and processing based not on leading-edge technology but on a more complex set of factors, including quality, immediacy and the availability of information’. This actually seems like sound common sense from an information professional’s point of view. Only the awareness of security and compliance issues is missing – and it’s arguably part of the infopro’s job to provide just that. In which case, some guidance from Intellect (a body formed by the merger between the Computing Services & Software Association and the Federation of the Electronics Industry) might provide useful ammunition. Document Management Concerns the Whole Board: a Guide for All Directors http://www.intellectuk.org/content/view/3702/83/ helps non-technical board-level executives spot the impact of poor information management, and shows how better practice can improve compliance, reduce risk and provide a competitive edge. It’s free, online, persuasive, and even looks and feels like a book. As a weapon for infopros, it seems spot on.

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