Small businesses - no time for esoteric language
Jinfo Blog

By Dale Moore

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The information management needs of small businesses are no different from those of large ones. All organisations need to understand the industry sectors in which they operate, who their competitors are, what opportunities are available, how to increase their market share and generally how to operate more effectively.

It’s just that large organisations can afford to devote specific resources (people, time and money) to the pursuit of maximising the management of their information. Large organisations of course employ more people, generate more content, perform more processes and collaborate in more widely dispersed teams, so the complexity factor is increased considerably. However, the core elements remain essentially the same and so the general principles are unaltered. 

While there’s a complete vocabulary surrounding information management principles in large organisations (possibly increasing the awareness of organisational information needs and practices) smaller businesses are largely unaware of such esoteric language. For example, small businesses tend not to use terms such as knowledge capital, information assets or enterprise content management but they understand well enough what these things are when explained. They also understand that they need to do something more formal about managing these but lack the specific resources - people, time and money! 

Largely due to the growing number of technological solutions now widely available, many smaller businesses are becoming aware of the need to take control of their information resources, albeit in a fairly haphazard and often fragmented way. There seems to be a growing awareness that there’s value in managing organisational information in a systematic, structured and controlled way.

Even if many organisations are unsure of what exactly is involved and how they might go about it. Many do understand the need to operate more effectively and talk of the need to: 

• Understand what it is people produce or collate that needs to be identified and managed. In other words an information (or content) audit.
• Capture and document the repeatable things people do that use content and perform essential business functions. In other words a process audit.
• Ensure that people are talking about the same things, labelling them in an organised and agreed way and finding them again when required. In other words metadata, taxonomic and controlled vocabulary development. 

There are of course many more components to a successful and unified enterprise content management strategy, not least the tools, techniques and expertise necessary to realise all this, but these are a good starting point and readily understood by smaller businesses who are thinking seriously about taking control of their hard won knowledge and information assets.

So, smaller businesses really do have the same information management needs although somewhat scaled down. The real fun is helping them realise it and implement a workable solution for them!

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