I now return to an old hobby horse of mine - how a company's information is managed and governed.
When I go into companies, their information pain is rarely due to previous neglect - far from it, most companies we see have spent copiously on IT, and have employed and contracted very bright people. It is clear, however, that despite this great effort, almost all employees typically roll their eyes when asked about their own systems. Is this down to monumental ingratitude, or something more substantial?
It is true that many employees don't really engage positively in the company's information efforts, rarely reading the careful user guides published by IT and preferring to hoard information their own way. For these people, somehow IT should just "work" miraculously. Added to this is a peculiarly British disease of being fashionably antithetical to technology, as if showing signs of aptitude or interest is to lack taste or sensibility.
However, it takes two to tango and whilst there might be an incorrigible core of holdouts clinging resolutely to the nineteenth century, there are plenty of those with the predisposition to get involved who have been turned off by chaos, asymmetry and bureaucracy: too often IT systems (and therefore company processes) are changed constantly as the latest whizz-bang system goes in, there is almost always the demand that employees put in more to these new systems than they get out of them, and petty rules govern the use of the systems where many employees have to break them to do their job.
Why have we failed so spectacularly? I believe the answer lies in the way information is governed. Traditionally, information is managed by the Departments that use it: thus the marketing team will develop/buy a CRM system, and finance an accounting package. Logical, eh? Actually not. By developing these systems in isolation, the company ends up with thickets of mutually incomprehensible information. And the only way these thickets are connected is through the message: to know something, you need to ask someone. Cue the awful reign of the email inbox: with no shared information language, the only common denominator is the message, bringing endless questions and data attachments forcing employees into a constant reconciliation - which of our biggest clients are behind with their payments? Ah, that'll be the vlookup on the finance spreadsheet with the CRM version. Umm, not sure that this "Smith" in the finance list is the same as the one in the CRM system - who can I email to ask? The recent rise in tools like Slack make little difference, simply swapping one messaging medium for another.
What is the answer? Clearly impossible to answer this definitively for everyone, but I believe it should always contain an effort to manage information around the needs of the information itself, not around those that need that information. Why so? For a start, such a governance structure forces the organisation to focus on its information, arguably its most important resource after its people. Surely companies do this? No, they mistake information for its containers: documents, processes, departments. Managing information from this perspective leaves it as an afterthought, simply the stuff that is poured in at the end, in lots of different formats that suit its particular container.
In order to illustrate why this is so important, allow me to digress: I was thinking about this article when travelling for the first time to Allianz Park, the home of Saracens Rugby Club. I was in central London, and whilst I knew I would need a combination of public transport to get there, I had no idea exactly which services I would need. Enter Google (there are other providers available...). They had done the hard work to surface all the relevant data in way that made sense, one to the other: think of a string of pearls, with the string being my travel query. In the jargon, Google had normalised the information (I protest that such nerdish knowledge does not (by itself) make me less of a sensitive human....), connecting all the thickets of information in such a way as to transform the efficiency of asking any number of questions of it. So despite my lack of knowledge, I was able to jump on the 221 bus from Mill Hill East and get off at the right spot as my smartphone had joined the dots.
The whole edifice of IT governance has, for well-intentioned reasons, been around supporting existing structures of business and the employees within. The irony is that by doing the opposite and ignoring the employees and their structures, you can serve them better by working to surface the data in an organisation as Google has done with transport information. So, the next time a vendor/head of IT comes to you with the latest idea for some new, expensive, "cutting edge" system, consider instead the slightly dull but truly transformative effect and going over what you already have, and joining the dots.