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.

Enterprise Social Media (ESM) is quite the hot ticket at the moment.  Why email it, when you can Slack it?  Not content to see their monopoly on business messaging fade, Microsoft have got into the act with their Teams product, hoping to dominate the social media space like it did in email through its super successful Exchange Server.  Google, Zoho, Tibco and many other vendors are also contending. 

The source of all the excitement is that businesses feel that they might have stumbled across a way finally to remove the email monkey from the backs of employees: the tyranny of the inbox is by far the biggest frustration felt by our clients when we conduct Digital Surveys.  ESM seems to offer a way for employees to connect outside traditional departmental silos,  becoming more productive as irrelevant information is screened out and their colleagues are only an instant message away, no matter where they are in the world.

At least, that's how it starts: soon, the familiar sense of overload creeps up, as the  benefit of having employees at their fingertips is wiped out by the stress of being at everybody else's.  What's worse is many of the apps will employ different "gamification" techniques to increase user interaction, prompting content for its own sake, further overloading those at the other end.  This should not be surprising, as although the enterprise has swapped the dull corporate email interface for one with emojis and West Coast Kool-Aid, the underlying premise remains the same.

Due to the shortcomings of business systems, employees have got used to the fact that if they want to know something, they need to ask someone.  Due to the absence of a single information map, people need other people to help find their way through thickets of departmental data, each incomprehensible to the other.  Thus, users are bombarded with requests for their thicket, frustrated by delays in their own requests in other thickets, and overwhelmed with updates about what's going on, "just to keep them in the loop".  Whether you're using an email inbox or a slack client in this exhausting game of message pinball is irrelevant (indeed people are using both, which doubles the exhaustion).

OK, I hear you say, how can that possibly be improved? It's a fact of busy corporate life.  Actually, there's plenty that can be done to improve things, and it starts with learning from the past, something us techies are not very good at.  Once upon a time, there existed in offices such a thing as a "File" - for a client, a project, etc.  That File (for it was a proper noun...) was the single version of the truth for a particular subject, that sat in a single place.  It was where any updates on the subject were filed.  So, not only could you see history on that subject that pre-dated your arrival at the company, you could find things that you weren't looking for.  The advent of email destroyed this content integrity, moving instead to using messages to achieve the same thing.  If you question why that is such a bad thing, just imagine be at a busy railway station in sealed room, with only the tannoy to help you keep track of the comings and goings.  Try writing it down and comparing it with a number of colleagues who were trying to do the same thing - with predictable results in inaccuracy and blood pressure.

Clearly we cannot go back to having a single paper File.  This is where ESM properly comes in: for File, think Wall.  Rather than map your ESM instance to people and groups of people, you map it to your information.  Thus things are updated, not people: employees choose to follow the bits of information that are relevant to them - marketing presentations, cash management processes, UK clients and so on.  That way they are in control of what they follow, and when they see it: newcomers get the history, and the business gets a single view of their most important subjects. 

Ironically, none of the vendors (except perhaps Tibco) have cottoned on to this yet, but all of the apps mentioned here can function perfectly well in this "Note to File" mode.  How do you get from message frenzy to this Wall karma?  The single most important step is for a business to recognise it needs to orientate itself around its information, not the other way around.  Once that is accepted, it can begin to build a universal map, with commonly understood nodal points for clients, products, processes, etc.  Give each nodal point a wall and you're cooking on gas.