1. Value of Information
What is the value of information in your organization? Because balance sheets for most companies don’t track the soft costs of developing
information, organizations often don’t really know what their
information is worth. If you were to ask most top-level managers how
valuable information is to their organization, most would swiftly tell
you that it is highly valuable. Yet it is often difficult to get those
same individuals to agree to manage that information better. Managing
information can form a competitive advantage. In addition, the following statistics indicate that the need to manage information better is strong.
Over 30 billion original documents are created and consumed each year.
Cost of documents is estimated to be as much as 15 percent of annual revenues.
85 percent of documents are never retrieved.
50 percent of documents are duplicates of other documents in some way.
60 percent of stored documents are obsolete.
For every $1 spent to create the document, $10 are spent to manage it.
It’s obvious that
organizations are great at creating documents, but not so good at
managing them. Most organizations have a strong tendency to commit more
resources to create information and fewer resources to manage that
information. As a result, operating knowledge is often undocumented,
tacit knowledge is rarely documented, and knowledge is easily lost
through transitions such as retirement or attrition. In most industries,
it is becoming more important to retain key knowledge that can be taken
by competitors, but most “how to” information is held in people’s minds
in an undocumented way.
So why do most companies not engage in a strong organization of their information? Frankly, excuses abound.
“If we need it, we can usually find it. Just send an e-mail and someone will find it.”
“No one will ever sue us, and if we do get sued, we’ll find what we need to defend ourselves.”
“We’ve
got to pick our battles. If it costs $20 to file a document, $120 to
find a misfiled document, and $220 to reproduce a lost document, then
it’s probably less expensive to find a misfiled document and reproduce a
lost document than it is to ensure that every document is filed
correctly.”
“Enterprise content management (ECM) is too expensive and there’s little return on investment (ROI), so why invest in it?”
The reality is that you’re
already paying for a bad ECM through opportunity costs. A good ECM will
lower your opportunity costs through better efficiencies. But in many
organizations, you’ll find these excuses proffered
by those who don’t see a need to invest in a better information
organization effort. It will take time and persistent education to help
those who hold these ideas recognize the need to invest in an
information organization project.
In addition to the excuses
about why better information management isn’t worth the effort,
sometimes companies aren’t even using the resources they have very well.
For example, in many organizations SharePoint is installed in such a
way that it is working in conflict with other ECM systems. When asked
how well SharePoint was working with other ECM systems, respondents to a
recent survey indicated that
SharePoint is working in conflict with other ECM systems in their company. (29%)
SharePoint is integrated with existing ECM suites. (16%)
SharePoint is the only ECM suite used in their organization. (12%)
SharePoint is used to “fill in some functions.” (43%)
The information technology (IT) department rolls out SharePoint with no input from record managers or ECM teams. (36%)
They realize no one is in charge and that SharePoint and ECM are out of control. (14%)
SMS/text messages, blogs,
wikis, and other Web 2.0 technologies are not part of the ECM solution
in 75 percent of organizations. This represents a major risk to
companies and prevents a large portion of collaborative activities from
being managed properly. Compliance officers are wrestling with how to
incorporate Web 2.0 technologies into their ECM compliance standards
while ensuring that teams can collaborate effectively to achieve
business goals.
2. What Is Putability?
Putability
is the quality of putting content into an information management and
retrieval system with the correct metadata. It is the degree to which
you put quality information into your information management system and
represents the first step in an overall information process. When it
comes to developing an information process, you must pay attention to three essential parts, as shown in Figure 1. How information goes into any information retrieval system will directly impact how well it comes out.
When it comes to putability,
you must pay attention to two truths—ignore these at your own peril.
First, what goes in must come out. This is the old “garbage in, garbage
out” adage about computing that has been used since the 1960s, and it
was originally developed to call attention to the fact that computers
will unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data (garbage
in) and produce equally nonsensical output (garbage out). It is amazing
that otherwise very smart people will think they can load volumes of
documents into SharePoint 2010 with little thought to organization and
then expect to find individual documents quickly and easily. Chaos does
not lead to organization, and organization is the foundation of
findability.
The second truth
associated with putability is that users will resist taking the time
required to put quality information into the system. Managers seem to be
especially resistant to having their information workers take time to
properly tag their information as it goes into the system. It seems that
the vast majority of information retrieval systems users mistakenly
believe that as long as the information is indexed, they’ll be able to
find it. User resistance is one of the most difficult obstacles to
overcome when implementing a robust information organization effort.
When asked who is responsible for tagging information, a survey elicited the following responses (multiple answers were allowed to this question, hence the total of more than 100 percent).
Authors (40%)
Records managers (29%)
SMEs (25%)
Anyone (23%)
Don’t know (12%)
No one (16%)
This means that in many
organizations, users simply don’t know who is responsible for tagging
information or are not directly assigned the tagging task to make that
information more findable. In the absence of a governance rule that
details who is responsible for tagging documents, the result is that
anyone (and yet no one) will be able to apply metadata to a document.
This is not a recipe for success.
3. What Is Findability?
Findability is the quality of being locatable or navigable.
It is the degree to which objects are easy to discover or locate. As
with putability, there are some truths to which you should pay
attention. First, you can’t use what you can’t find. So it really
doesn’t matter whether or not the information exists—if you can’t find
it, you can’t use it. The corollary to this is that information that
can’t be found is pragmatically worthless. You might have spent millions
to develop that information, but if you can’t find it when you need it,
it is worthless.
Second, information that is
hard to find is hardly used. It stands to reason that users who won’t
take the time to put quality information into the system will also not
take much time to find the information they need. Often, if users can’t
find information quickly and easily, they will simply e-mail someone who
they think can find the information for them, or they may simply not
include that information in their decision-making processes.
Of course, the more the information is needed
by the user, the harder she will work to find it. But in the long run,
users won’t put out any more effort than they believe is minimally
necessary to do their job.
Note:
Out of the three parts to
the information process, putability and findability are the most
interwoven. The hosting of the information is merely the static
retention of that information between the two major actions of putting
information into the system and then pulling it back out. The main thing
to remember is that the quality of information input into SharePoint
2010 directly impacts the output of information from SharePoint 2010.
Why are
putability and findability important? Because you can do all of the
following tasks correctly and still not succeed (from your user’s
viewpoint) with your SharePoint 2010 implementation.
Capacity plan your servers correctly
Scale out your farm correctly
Implement all of the customizations correctly
Implement a robust search and indexing solution
Train your users correctly
Write the business and technical requirements for your deployment
Manage your servers so there are no errors or warnings in any of the event logs
The real success of
any SharePoint implementation will be evaluated largely in terms of how
well users can manage and find information using the features in
SharePoint. Although the rest of the items listed previously are
essential to a successful deployment, the support and furtherance of the
business goals
will be the final arbiter of whether or not the deployment is
successful. In most environments, those business goals will be defined,
in part, in information management terms.
3.1. How Well Is Findability Understood?
When respondents were
asked the question “How well is findability understood in your
organization?” in the Findability and Market IQ survey conducted by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), the following answers were given.
It is well understood and addressed. (17%)
It is vaguely understood. (31%)
Not sure how search and findability are different. (30%)
No clear understanding of findability at all. (22%)
This means that over half
(52%) of the employees in organizations today that participated in the
survey either don’t know what findability is, or they are not able to
differentiate findability from search technologies. Many believe that if
they have a stand-alone search tool, then findability is being
adequately addressed. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Search is too often viewed as
an application-specific solution for findability. Search technologies
focus on trying to ask the right question and on “matching” keyword
queries with content under the assumption that if the right words are
input as the query, the right content will be found. What you must
understand is that findability is not a technology—it is a way of
managing information that is embedded in the organization. Achieving
success with the information process relies on well-defined patterns and
practices that are consistently applied to the information. Although it
is true that search technologies support efforts to find information,
search can’t fix the “garbage in, garbage out” problems present in most
organizations today. The carelessness with which organizations manage
information cannot be resolved by a technology.
3.2. The Paradox of Findability as a Corporate Strategy
When asked the degree to
which findability is critical to their overall business goals and
success, 62 percent of respondents indicated that it is imperative or
significant. Only 5 percent felt it had minimal or no impact on business
success. Yet 49 percent responded that even though findability is
strategically essential, they have no formal plan or set of goals for
findability in their organization. Of the other 51 percent who claimed
to have a strategy, 26 percent reported that they used an ad hoc
strategy—that is, they developed it only as needed— meaning that they
had no strategy at all. Hence, 75 percent of organizations surveyed had
no findability strategy, even though many believe it is strategically
essential.
3.3. The Opportunity Cost of a Poor Information Process and Architecture
So, what are the opportunity
costs of maintaining a poor information process and architecture? The
information on cost studies is not robust, but the data available
suggests that organizations are losing a lot of money on this problem. A
good study on the costs related to time spent searching for hard-to-find information suggests the following.
Typical employees spend an average of 3.5 hours per week trying to find information but not finding it.
These employees spend another 3.0 hours recreating information they know exists, but that they cannot find.
Note:
An opportunity cost
is the cost of passing up the next best choice when making a decision.
For example, if an asset such as capital is used for one purpose, the
opportunity cost is the value of the next best use of that asset. In
this chapter, the opportunity cost is the value of work that is lost by
the corporation because they choose to pay their workers to spend time
working within a problematic information system instead of having their
work focused on other potentially revenue-generating activities.
This means that the
average knowledge worker spends 6.5 hours per week searching for
information, not finding it, and then recreating that information so
that the worker can move forward in his or her job. At an average salary
of $60,000 (US dollars) per year, this “lost” time equates to $9,750
per worker per year. In a company with 1000 employees, this equates to
an annual opportunity cost of $9.7 million (US dollars). In addition,
that company with 1000 employees will spend $5.7 million per year (US
dollars) simply to have users reformat data as it moves between
applications, and they will spend another $3.3 million per year dealing with version control issues.
So, what prevents workers from finding information? The AIIM survey found the following reasons.
Poor search functionality (71%)
Inconsistency in how workers tag/describe data (59%)
Lack of adequate tags/descriptors (55%)
Information not available electronically (49%)
Poor navigation (48%)
Don’t know where to look (48%)
Constant information change (37%)
Can’t access the system that hosts the info (30%)
Workers don’t know what they are looking for (22%)
Lack the skills to find the information (22%)
Note that the first three
reasons users cite are really about the putability side of the
information process. So if an organization inconsistently tags and
describes information, then the users will experience a poor result set,
which is described in this list as “poor search functionality.”
A poor search functionality, from the viewpoint of the user, is really about a result set that is not helpful or is irrelevant.
A relevant result set has content items that are useful and helpful to
the user. In most cases, a poor result set that is blamed on a poor
search technology is really just a mirror of a bad information
architecture implementation. In other words, garbage was put into the
system, and so the result set tends to be garbage, which results in the
end user blaming the technology for a poor search functionality.
However, if you have a strong information architecture coupled with
users who work together to maintain a set of patterns and practices for
how information is managed, then search results will likely be relevant
to the user. Again, the real problem in the management of information
does not have to do with technology, but rather with the people who
interact with the information management and retrieval system—that is,
with an organization’s willingness to invest in the staff as well as the
software so that, working together (people and software), they can
establish a successful, usable information architecture.
