Insight 3 from Research Focus - Don't just dream it; DO it
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Abstract

Continuous improvement is paramount to becoming an Information Centre of Excellence and this means constantly reviewing key areas of your operations to remain relevant. Find out how Jinfo can help you implement the changes necessary to develop new capabilities for the future and how this year's trends may affect you.

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Insight 3 from Research Focus

Becoming an Information Centre of Excellence is an ongoing project. By the time you realise any part of your strategic vision, it's time to update it and take it to the next level - or to pivot to address new disruptions that have come your way whilst you've been hard at work.

That's why the third insight for the Research Focus, "The Information Centre of Excellence - commercial, consultative, collaborative" is this:

Continuous improvement starts today; your strategy needs to be concrete.

Design and polish the strategy, but more important is your workplan, and within that workplan you need to accommodate time for evaluation, piloting, innovation and improvements. Nothing can be "business as usual" in this world.

It's a high bar, and on a practical level, most information teams hold themselves to the continuous improvement standard for key areas of their operations for reasons of capacity. But even in these cases, we strongly recommend a periodic review to ensure that the focal points you picked are still the ones that matter most.

The most important thing, however, is clarity: understand your options for making improvements large and small. Pick concrete actions you can take daily to push forward towards your vision. And always, always make time for reengineering and evaluation.

What you can do

It never hurts to remind ourselves of the basic principles of change. Check out "Continuous improvement - what does it mean and how do you measure it?"

Then, analyse how you compare today with the Information Centre of Excellence model; Jinfo's articles on what the best teams do, particularly for operations and team characteristics, will be useful.

It's not unusual to realise that manual tasks can and should be moved to purpose-built tools and platforms that do a much better job than humans can. Our market landscapes on chatbots, idea-management platforms and digital adoption systems will give you ideas about what might work in your environment.

Managing change is a skill like any other, and practicing strengthens your ability. To that end, you may find the Jinfo report, "Improving success through project piloting" helpful for determining how to work on a small scale before full implementation of a new process or product.

Even little changes - such as terminology - can make a big difference. If you are responsible for content purchasing, shift your vocabulary to "content licensing", to remind yourselves as much as your stakeholders of how content and data resources operate as assets in your organisation.

Finally, get perspective on the most important trends for 2020 and how they might affect you by attending (or viewing the recording and notes of) the Jinfo webinar, "State of the industry, 2020".

Jinfo can help

Our in-house workshop, "Construct your roadmap to an Information Centre of Excellence" enables you to articulate what your future vision and strategy are. But when it gets down to the day-to-day actions that create change, you need practical tools. Jinfo's workshop, "Do better with less: workflow optimisation" teaches you how to create that change so that you have more room for developing the new capabilities you want for the future.

Purchase individually, or ask us about a tailored package of multiple workshops, to suit your timing and budget.

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