5 Rules to Make Your Information Your Advantage

With manage, share and reuse as the keywords for enterprise information management in mind, let us look at the 5 rules to make your information your advantage.

Everyday we define and refine our own ways of doing business. Any business; big, medium or small; in any sector; for-profit or nonprofit; any size or nature; creates its own unique competitive advantage only through such defined ways of business. After all, if you stand for something, there's got to be something solid.

Relatively speaking we also generate a lot of fluid information – conversational content for instance is fluid; emails being the most prominent after the spoken forms of communication. We are in a habit of streaming too much information via emails that get layered under the flooded chronology. Besides emails, many other types of fluid information is largely of one-time use. As a good practice, business leaders regularly study patterns in fluid information and define policies, procedures and plans that enable delegation and create efficiency, consistency and coherence. All such information that defines ways of recurring action are thereafter recorded as solid information; and enable business to step up to the next level. These are means to capitalize information into an enterprise asset.

Instead of moving in circles, let us push to move ahead. If solid information is not managed appropriately, it dilutes the leverage from the first investment made earlier in a similar or comparable business context.

Besides unproductive use of time and resources, this percolates inconsistencies and limits continuous improvement. Business will not move forward if every team member made a separate version of the same information.

For instance a proposal, a pitch or a plan can leverage from what is already available - and tailor only the parts that require custom messaging. Information management captures and capitalizes the investment in the original effort for repeated future leverage – instead of simply expensing the efforts as mere spending.

Thomas Jefferson once said “Information is the currency of democracy”. Information defines the balance of power. Hence, democratizing information is the means of creating a culture of empowerment and equality.

Intentional hoarding of information for individual agendas, to derive personal advantage must be banned and harshly dealt with. Even unintentionally created silos of information needs to be proactively controlled. As ownership rights of every piece of information produced by anyone vests with the business, the same must be shared freely for repeated leverage by all. Internal rivalries cannot be a barrier to steady progress of the organization. Information is the greatest equalizer. Encourage sharing of information – equate ‘I don’t share’ with ‘I don’t care’.

Passive and unstructured information remains dormant without being used. It is like a non-performing asset. One of the simplest test to know the difference between active and passive information is “Ask vs Find”. If one has to ask for information from someone else, instead of finding it herself or himself – that information is passive.

The levels from passive to active information are very much like a color gradient – every shade is a variation on (a) convenience of access and ease of use; and (b) on relevance and preciseness. So beyond the conceptual difference, it is a blended gradient of access and quality.

Active information is managed in a way that it is instantly available at the time of need and point of need – hence applied in the moment to align with the defined ways of business or to make better decisions faster. Passive information remains underutilized.

Enterprise information management is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel. It is a way of life! It is an ongoing discipline to manage, share and reuse information as an enterprise asset. It is not a dated project undertaken from start to finish to complete a task on the checklist.

Whether you do it consciously or not, you are doing this anyhow. Conscious and effective execution will only unleash the true potential of the insights gathered over time. Else you will let the information dissipate and make it a non-performing asset. Closer analogy is a telephone connection, we do not activate to make just one call, we simply keep a live connection to remain connected.

Progressive organizations continually move more and more information to the solid and active state. This ensures that information is being nurtured as an enterprise asset and is easily made available to everyone based on an information classification mapped to the organization and to other people like customers, distributors and vendors. So the way to measure is to monitor that information is regularly graduated into the advantage quadrant.