Dennis D. McDonald continues to propose interesting thoughts on information management. This one – on the importance of social media in post-merger organisations – struck a particular chord with me.
A previous project I ran was to implement an internal knowledge management portal for a company that had been through several rapid mergers of some pretty small companies into a pretty large one. The company’s success is based on its staff expertise and wealth of project experience, but the full range and depth of this knowledge lay fragmented across a few people from the various entities that constituted the new whole. As a consequence, the sales team didn’t know that they could use staff who’d already engaged with a particular client, or that there were case studies for similar projects including case studies and lessons learned. The wheel was being reinvented. It was obvious that some kind of networking tool that enabled staff to identify expertise in people and projects would lend the business a helping hand and could be implemented with relative ease.
Instead, the directors decided that a search engine that could span all the company’s file servers would be more cost-effective. But how many useful results did the staff get from keyword searches? For all the typical reasons – little classification, poor naming conventions, poor security, inappropriate technology – close to none. The content was there but the information wasn’t.
Just as art only becomes art once you place it in a gallery, content only becomes information when you identify it as useful. The quality of the information, like art, is debatable, but it has no chance of being used if you don’t suggest to people that it’s useful information. Following a merger, staff need to know: these are the kind of people who work here and this is what they know about. To find out more, ask them.
Yet even in the most obvious of cases for implementing simple information management tools, their raison d’être can be by-passed. The company in question didn’t implement a networking tool and nearly two years later still doesn’t know some of its clients, the skills of many of its staff or the scope of most of its past projects. Many staff have left. Yet is the company bothered? Absolutely not.
The directors simply changed the strategy. If the sales team weren’t paying attention to certain clients or types of projects, it’s because they weren’t important enough. The strategy dictated that employees focus on bigger and better in their portfolio, as befitted the newly-merged company status. Who needs the past when you have the future?
It’s a bullish policy in a bullish market, but when things inevitably turn bearish, there’ll be a scramble to avoid repeating the mistakes of previous engagements, find people with relevant knowledge, return to reliable clients who weren’t in the big league. By then, both employees and clients could be long gone, and gleaning information from fragmentary content may well prove impossible.
While your work is easy, information has little value. As soon as your work gets tough, it’s the people and companies with the information who’ll profit.
Updated: Alan Pelz-Sharpe has also written about ECM technologies and recession.