Effective Management of Your Information Resources

A Way to Increase Process Efficiency and Productivity

Alan Jackson of The Better Business Bureau Ltd.

Every day, scores of decisions are being made across your business. Many will affect your short-term effectiveness and long-term profitability. Yet organisations can be frighteningly inefficient at managing the information necessary to support their business processes.

I don’t have to tell you the costs of paper-based business processes. Manual information handling and management can cost “a bomb”. A typical worker loses the equivalent of several weeks a year searching for misplaced information at work. Documents are often lost for good.

Having the right information to hand when it’s needed improves productivity and the quality of all those decisions. So efficient management of this information is essential to the success of your business.

Content – a Growing Challenge

Typically, 80+ percent of an organisation’s a total information resource is vested in documents containing various forms of text, graphics and images. This “content”, as it’s called, unlike information in traditional databases, has little or no inherent structure. In the “information age” the availability and necessity for content is growing at an increasing rate. Yet many organisations undervalue, and most continue to neglect this important resource.  

Content is often spread across an organization in various departmental “silos”, making much of it inaccessible to the people who need it. Electronic documents, such as specifications, operating procedures, contractual agreements and regulations, that represent the lifeblood of the company are frequently poured into the ubiquitous and, usually, disastrously chaotic and under-managed facility, the “shared drive”. If you have any poignant “shared drive” horror stories you can share, please add them to the comments, below…

You need to gain control over your unstructured content to improve the effectiveness and turn it into a corporate asset. Properly managed information can add significantly to enterprise competitiveness and improve profitability. Workers who can search, retrieve, share and review information in context will reduce exception handling, failure demand and manual processing, bringing costs down and improving service.

Content Agility to Streamline Decision Making

Content agility is about using content to increase the overall responsiveness and productivity of your operations. It’s about being able to respond quickly and effectively to the business and transaction events that set important processes in motion. It’s about having the information on hand to support decision-making in business processes.

The strategies that allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information resides, is known by the generic term Enterprise Content Management (ECM). ECM methods and tools provide the ability to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes.

Consider the advantages to a customer service department when internal documents, scanned images of external documents and workflow functionality are brought together to allow agents to access any information needed to resolve a customer enquiry. Likewise, an accounting department could access supplier invoices, purchase orders from an imaging system, and contracts and regulations as part of an approval workflow. Web content management further enables presentation via a Web browser, allowing an organization to conduct business and commerce over the Internet. So a courier company could provide instant customer access to inventories, shipping and receiving documents, and waybills.

Reaping the Benefits of Effective Content Management

You need the right information to make informed decisions – maybe scores of times a day. Effective content management ensures that the right information is available when it’s needed most. These capabilities can deliver a significant return on investment along with a wide range of business benefits, such as:

• Making the most of the information and knowledge contained in your content,
• Reducing costs by saving the hundreds of man-hours every year that can be spent accessing, handling and manipulating all forms of content,
• Being able to react immediately to customer demands and other business events,
• Ensuring information security, accuracy and integrity,
• Improving regulatory compliance and, consequently, reducing and better managing risk,
• Processing work substantially faster,
• Extending the reach of information to wherever and whenever it is needed,
• Levering existing investments by sharing content between otherwise disconnected processes.  

Effective content management will reduce operating costs and deliver a significant reduction in fixed costs … so adding a significant amount of incremental profit to your bottom line. Having all the information needed to make the right decision quickly and efficiently satisfies clients, partners, suppliers, and shareholders alike.

The Way Forward

In a nutshell, if information is critical to your business functions and processes, your content resources must be easily accessible, completely secure and properly managed. There are a variety of proprietary ECM packages available on the market that can help. But before rushing to automate, which can prove to be a costly mistake (see: http://wp.me/pJElS-1C ), the proper disciplines coupled with properly managed shared drives are a good and relatively inexpensive place to start – as I’ll explain in a future article.

About

Alan Jackson is a business development coach operating in the UK Midlands region (www.bureau4betterbusiness.co.uk). Follow me on Twitter or email me at alan.jackson@bureau4betterbusiness.co.uk. Feel free to leave comments or subscribe for more small business productivity insights.

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