Data is being generated at a faster rate than ever before – a trend that will become ever more pronounced over the coming years.
This surplus of information reduces action and can lead people to ‘analysis paralysis’ – over analysis of information to the point where no decisions are actually taken. How do organisations put people back at the heart of information flow?
Many organisations today are still operating on an ‘old era’ model of information management of create…publish…store…retrieve but with the rapid explosion of organisational data which leads to a situation where much enterprise information is duplicated or redundant. Furthermore, in an era where producing is the new consuming and anyone can be a content publisher, it can be almost impossible to
keep up; today the medical profession alone publishes over 25,000 journals.
The question for organisations is how to re-establish a timely and context driven
information management strategy that puts people back at the heart of the information flow. There is no one-stop shop technology solution that will provide the answer, and significant cultural change will also be required. There are, however, some emerging principles that point towards how organisations can become much more effective at exploiting the value of their information:
Trust makes an excellent filter
Useful and valuable information tends to rise to the surface and by allowing people to rate and publicise their information sources you can begin to gain a greater understanding of where the valuable information lies within the organisation. Expect to see much more emphasis on human-centric ways for organising and searching information in organisations where people tag, rate and
categorise information and screen out irrelevant results.
Timeliness and context
Information management is often a last in, first out process where the most recent results are the most relevant, but the value of timely information can be enhanced even further if it is presented in context. For example, mobile location services such as FourSquare provides timely information such as who is at a particular location, but do not yet provide the context of your relationship with them. We
expect to see much greater use of semantic technologies that bring context to information used in enterprises over the coming years.
Exploit the connections
The value of information often lies in its interconnectedness but often the connections are not made explicit. By exploring the relationships and connections between different types of information it will be possible for organisations to learn a lot, for example, buying habits revealed by a social network may be used to predict whether a new product will take off.
Making it relevant
Information management tools are most powerful when they map information to people. When Netflix outsourced the improvement of its suggestion engine into the public domain, it knew that the US$1 million prize was well worth the bottom
line implications of a 10% improvement in being able to predict their customers’ ratings for films. Organisations will become more focused on providing their people with information that is much more highly targeted to their needs. A key part of reducing overload is to provide only the information that is relevant as opposed to complete information.
Push versus pull
The next generation of information management systems will take information and people, and allow them to become more connected and more distributed. Information will be pulled to individuals from multiple sources and dynamically
assembled according to their requirements at the time.
Looking much further ahead, as information management converges with other scientific disciples, the next information frontier is programming of human life and
matter through manipulating cells and organising atoms; we certainly don’t want to approach this using old era tools and techniques.
To find out more information about emerging IT trends in information management, contact us now.