In september I was attending the Gartner Portals Content & Collaboration Summit in London - in many ways a very interesting seminar when you are interested in Information Management. How ever the topic for this blog post is The Information Paradox which I saw very clearly communicated on the seminar.
We all hunger for information - we can't get enough. We keep wanting faster and more updates on current events (like watching news in the S-train, reading feeds on the mobile, demanding more information from our managers) while at the smae time keeping and saving more and more information instead of deleting it when we have used it (you never actually know if you need it again...). Personally I never ever deletes anything in my inbox, which is why I discovered a bug in Outlook 2003 when I eventually had to clean up a day - you could only delete 2000 emails at a time.
This small story only shows what our problem has become with information today. We are franticly collecting information to be updated, to be in front, to have advantages over others while slowly choking in the shear amount of files and information collected and preserved. Still faster coming to a point where you are no longer able to find or overview what you actually need.
And this tendency becomes even more abundant when we are looking at the enterprise. 100's of people executing the same behaviour making this problem 100+ times worse when looking at the enterprise's ability to find and use exisiting information. When we have too little information we cannot perform or mitigate risks effectively. In the process of collecting and preserving information we reach a point of effective performance and risk mitigation, but this state dissolves into an even larger state of ineffectiveness when the amount of information increases again. This is the Information Paradox.
This challenge apply for all professional relations I have encountered, whether public organisations, professional service organsiations, oil companies, utility companies - choose you vertical. Gartners generic answer to this challenge is implementing an Information Governance program - consisting of roles, responsibilities, policies, standards, procedures, tools and technologies and most important metrics for handling and governing information. To get the situation under control and break the Information Paradox.
An important part of the Agile Case and Document Management concept is the ability to access and thereby activate your previous investments in creating valuable information. Activation is of course only a part of the solution - you will need to look into how to take control over legal and compliance covered information ans well as how to implement information lifecycle management to retire outdated information as soon as you can.
Bottom point is you need to take action - the problem is only growing while we wait, exposing you and your organsiation for increasing risks while decreasing efficiency in parallel.
