Innovations in e-information -- what does it mean for small businesses?

by Jennifer Smith

18 June 2009

I’ve spent the past two days at the UKeIG’s excellent Innovations in e-information conference in Manchester. With great speakers and equally thought-provoking attendees, I learnt a good deal about developments in e-information.

Inevitably there was a bias towards issues in large organisations, since that’s where there’s most activity in Information Management. As someone who’s been working to improve information management in smaller organisations, I was keen to pick up any tips from our larger counterparts that could be of use to our small business clients.

Following two days of intense information discussions, I still believe that small businesses using appropriate technology, like OneIS, can achieve much better results than large organisations in organising and utilising their information.

So, here’s my impressions of what current innovations in e-information mean for small businesses.

Findability

The biggest issue is still findability.

• Finding the right information at the right time, and knowing you can trust that information, is an enormous problem in large organisations. It’s partly down to different people using different vocabulary, having multiple systems, and different parts of the organisation not working well together.
• Storing non-text files such as podcasts, video clips and images are particularly problematic if you can’t index them.
• Search is still a problem inside many large organisations again because of multiple systems and their sometimes ineffective search engines.

Small businesses are much more cohesive, since small teams know each other and work together towards common goals. The issues of “persuading senior management” and “boardroom politics” are thankfully not a part of life in most small businesses. This means implementing systems and strategies tend to be more straightforward once everyone agrees to go ahead.

As for findability, in OneIS, we’ve made it very easy to describe every piece of information, from documents to images to those miscellaneous notes, in a consistent manner. We’ve made them easier to find, not just by searching, but by browsing and discovering relevant information by following the links that connect all the pieces of information. And since you can find stuff more easily, you can directly see the benefits to yourself and your team of gathering information and sharing what you know.

Security

Everyone is rightly concerned about the security of their information.

• Large organisations have very conservative policies around information security. They have employees with full time responsibility for “Risk management” and “IT Security.” This tends to lead to slow adoption of technology, even technology which could help reduce their security risk.
• In an increasingly mobile world, losing a laptop is expensive and annoying, but losing the potentially sensitive and critical information on the laptop poses a significant risk to the business.

Small businesses, without an IT department, have a very different relationship with technology, especially when it comes to hosted services. A large company is unlikely to adopt hosted services, because it means those individuals with the responsibility to safe guard the information have to trust another organisation.

But small businesses are enthusiastically adopting hosted services, because they know that the provider will do a much better job than they could, because backups and security are handled for them. With their information accessible over the internet whenever they need it from wherever they are, they don’t need to carry all their documents with them on their laptop. Which means far less of their information is at risk of falling into the wrong hands if they lose a laptop.

Of course, it’s easy to further protect against information getting into the wrong hands from a lost laptop by enabling data encryption in Windows or Mac OS X. This means the information is made unreadable to anyone without the password, but you still need to ensure you have a copy of the information, which is why you want to keep all your work in the hosted system.

Multiple systems

I mentioned how multiple systems affected findability, but it’s a bigger issue than just that.

• Large organisations have lots of different systems, one for each function
• The problems of having a separate document management system and intranet were mentioned by several delegates
• There are often different systems for collaborating on, and then storing, information
• And of course you can’t search well across multiple systems

Multiple systems may be cumbersome for a large organisation, but would be a nightmare for small organisations who don’t have the staff to maintain them. It makes me especially pleased that we overcame many of these genuinely horrid problems in OneIS simply by having multiple functions in one system, enabling documents and intranet pages to be stored (and searched!) in the same system, and having one system supporting both collaboration and the storage of information.

Social media

Of course there was lots of talk at UKeIG 2009 about using social media. Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and Wikis were all hot topics. I think experimenting with social media is much easier in small organisations than in larger businesses, where fears over reputation and security still seem to be a hurdle to innovation.

Interestingly, a study by TFPL and Napier University presented by Hazel Hall showed the biggest risk organisations felt over social media was “failure to capitalise on opportunities offered by social computing tools due to poor implementation management.”

The overall message on social media seemed to be to try it out and see what works, and most importantly, to remember it could be fun!

Technology

It was pleasing to see a Technology Evangelist on the programme. But apart from Richard Wallis’ superb talk on Waves of innovation and Karen Blakeman’s Search Seminar, there was surprisingly little talk about technology.

I’m always disappointed in Information conferences by the lack of time given to talking about Information Technology. These are the tools we use to do our work, so developments in IT can dramatically affect what we can achieve. Yet there’s a surprising lack of interest in IT developments. I endlessly hear “it’s not all about the technology” but it is at least partly about the technology.

OneIS benefits greatly from the combined knowledge of Information and IT Professionals. Through this we can provide a holistic solution to organising information in small businesses.

I’m a big advocate of Information and IT people working together. It’s sad to hear so many stories of Information people not working well with their IT departments in larger organisations. Perhaps we need more conferences for both Information and IT people, so we can start to recognise we’re all on the same side?

(Time for a quick plug to our Marketing Masterclass for Information and IT Professionals on 7 July, with the aim of facilitating a little inter-profession networking!)

What we need now

My overall impression of UKeIG 2009 was summed up by the first speaker, Jan Wilkinson, when she talked about the need for “energy, innovation and change.” Absolutely! We cannot possibly hope to shape the future unless we are enthusiastic about getting there.