How's the water today? Are you swimming in Information Assets without knowing it?
Do we even realise that we ‘swim’ in Information Assets and instead of using them, we expend ourselves fighting complex and unnecessary processes and technology?
The tragedy is that people in echo chambers (i.e. the ones of the accepted ‘normal’ in technology) often don't even realise they are trapped. This is a point made by the novelist David Foster Wallace, who tells a story that starts in a fish tank. "There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks at the other and goes, 'What the hell is water?'
This situation is one of the very few things in life that annoy me to no end! Call it an aversion to wasted resources, time and capability. Call it something that rubs me the wrong way because it is so restrictive to people’s creativity and the use of their precious time. Or perhaps it rubs me the wrong way because it takes away from people’s freedom to focus on what matters in their professional lives, being successful and enjoy what they are doing.
Here is how this mess sneaks into our business lives without us even realising and it does not matter if you are a student, a researcher, an accountant, if your company is a SME or a large one! Only the scale changes:
- We all start small. First, we need to decide what desktop we will be using. Will it be Microsoft? Perhaps MacOS or Linux? Will it be stand-alone or DaaS (Desktop as a Service)? It matters not. All are good choices and frankly, the only thing that matters is for the desktop to be stable and do the job.
- Then it will be a decision on the applications (local, hosted or SaaS). Now things get a bit more interesting because individual needs differ. Some businesses will just need the usual package from MS Office, Apple or Linux. Some will need to take a step further and have a Customer Records Management to manage their customers or an Enterprise Resource Planning to manage the whole organisation. The list of IT systems is almost endless. Let’s say you are a SME and for the time being you do not need a CRM. This is the point where the dispersal of your Information Assets starts and the problem and pain become obvious. Let’s unpack this a little… Say you just have the basic Office suit (word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, email) and you interact with a number of customers you consider 'manageable'. You will have documents (hopefully saved in a directory with your customer’s name), spreadsheets (saved in the same directory or a different one because that’s how you thought it makes sense), perhaps some presentations (same thing about saving them in directories) and a good few emails (saved in your email client, for instance MS Outlook). All these are your Information assets you use to manage these customers and the business lines you have with them (these are your profit lines, don't forget this!). What do you do when you work with these business lines to answer a question, to send an invoice, to do a task etc? I bet that the first thing you do is to pull out information from all the places you have stored it and try to build a picture of what’s happening, what happened and how all these are connected so you can do the right thing efficiently and effectively. How long do you think it will take you to rebuild the complete story line of this customer or activity? Multiply this by the number of business lines you deal with every day. Not a pretty picture, is it?
- Let’s have a look now at a situation where you have a CRM, an ERP or any corporate-level system to manage your activities. It can be on-premises, hosted or a SaaS. If you chose well, 2 things will be clearly visible:
- You will be using at least 60%-70% of the system’s capabilities. If you are not, you have paid a lot more money than you need to, and
- Before moving to this system, you have reviewed your processes and they are all relevant, lean, efficient, effective and understood by all in your business. If you have not, you have just transferred the shortcomings of your past to a new and expensive environment – it is called digital bureaucracy, don’t expect a lot of benefit from your new IT system.
And here comes the hidden problem: no matter what you do, your business activities will be driven (to a significant extent) by the way this IT system you are using is designed and the way it operates and interacts. In simple terms: if a system is influenced by the banking environment because this is the major market segment it serves, it will show this pedigree in the way it operates no matter what. If you buy and use this system, you better be a bank. By the same token, if a system is inspired by industry based on production lines, same thing – you better using production lines in your business. Can you customise these systems? Of course and to the delight of their vendors. The more you customise, the more they earn and the more your dependency on them grows stronger.
Looks like a lose-lose situation: No big IT system, a lot of Information Assets confusion and risk. Big IT system, a lot of cost and not very clear benefits.
Well, not at all! But we need to go back to basics, have clarity of thinking and a sharp focus on what truly matters:
- Back to basics: it is human psychology that drives us and leads us to draw conclusions - not big and complex IT systems. It is not even the data! It is the picture the data paints
- Clarity of thinking: Not helped at all by long lists of files, different systems and convoluted links between this and that or the fear that we have missed something. It is helped a lot though by having the complete story line of the matter at hand in front of us
- Sharp focus: the more we spend or focus on how to use an unyielding IT system, the more we cloud our thinking and veer away from the true business task at hand
