-Now they are all pulling out their hair in frustration simply because they have not invested the money necessary to handle massive amounts of data."
Portals and intranets
Williams says a commitment to collaboration and a strategy based around the creation of a decent portal or intranet is essential to help ease their info-glut. He regales a tale of how his parent company, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, became obsessed with avoiding conflicts of interest in the aftermath of the Andersen auditing and accounting controversy at Enron.
-Deloittes has 130,000 staff and there were hundreds of e-mails exchanged every day from partners seeking to establish if taking on a contract in one part of the world would create a conflict of interest somewhere else," Williams recalls. -It was a nightmare. There was so much noise that most colleagues deleted the messages on sight."
His solution was to build a component for the intranet that gathered together all these queries and then released a weekly bulletin. -It became a key barometer of activity and reduced the e-mails in the organisation by 80 percent," he adds. It was one reason why Deloittes intranet was voted among the world's top 10 by an American computer magazine.
Gartner is another example of harnessing the power of collaboration. It runs a proprietary Web-based system called GRADS that is used by its 800-plus analysts and consultants around the world to review each other's work before publication.
The interface, while a little slow, provides a fail-safe mechanism that prevents publication without a minimum number of reviews and a manager's sign-off. -The culture is one of sharing in Gartner," says Roberts, one of the company's vice-presidents.
-GRADS, or any other collaborative system, would fail without that culture of community. There are too many instances in large organisations where colleagues guard their knowledge and adopt an attitude of 'why should I tell you?'
-For the sake of the organisation, management must stamp out such behaviour because they will find it increasingly difficult to survive in an information-charged economy."
Roberts says organisations grappling with information overload should decide what they want to achieve. -The greatest threat to business is ignorance -- not knowing what is happening around you," he continues.
-A philosophy based around corporate performance management and the balanced scorecard is an excellent place to start for senior management. -Throughout the organisation, information should be gathered to reflect workers' KPIs (key performance indicators). The challenge is to get the right information to the right people at the right time."
In this era of IT scepticism, articulating a clear case for a return on investment (ROI) is essential.
Eclipse's Williams says capturing the savings is not an easy task as some of the benefits manifest themselves -soft" ways, such as improvement in risk management assessment, increased utilisation of existing templates and other intellectual property, and reduction in time-to-publish.
-The more demonstrable improvements," Williams says, -are the centralisation of publishing and reductions in costs for network maintenance, storage, printing, and people. But to achieve this, you have to build a collaborative framework or intranet that staff will want to use. If the interface is terrible, then they won't come back."
No escaping info overload
If only life were so simple, says Phillips Fox's John Duckett, one of the few IT chiefs in Australia with a degree in knowledge management. -In a legal practice, the only philosophy that really exists is the demand to retain every scrap of information," he says. -My storage demands double every year at the moment. We keep everything in triplicate, and I am not even sure how much of it is read."
The firm uses a content management tool called 42 -- named in honour of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. (-42" is the answer to the meaning of life for those who are not fans of author Douglas Adams.) Phillips Fox has also deployed the Fulcrum full-text search engine and Hummingbird technology at the back-end to encourage e-mail archiving. -One strategy has been to use the archiving system as a reason to bring down the size of an individual's mailbox to 50 megabytes, says Duckett. -That has not been easy to achieve because there is always someone with a good reason why the policy should not apply to them.
-We discuss the problem of information overload quite a lot, but there is no easy solution when everyone wants to keep everything. It's part of the culture of a major legal practice."
-Every company is a victim of information overload," observes Swayne Hill, managing director of business intelligence specialist Cognos and the holder of a degree in philosophy. -There is a tonne of pressure to change the situation. We know there is technology out there to get the job down, but the true force must be behavioural change.
-Senior management must show a commitment to the process and take ownership of any project to ease the problem. But chief executives are under pressure to retain as much data as possible because of the recent changes to legislation to ensure their personal accountability for corporate reportage of their numbers.
-At the end of the day, they want to stay in cufflinks, not handcuffs."
This article was first published in Technology & Business magazine.
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