Why Can’t Your Information System Do This?
Peter Drucker has called for the next information revolution. Books using terms like data smog, technostress and information anxiety explain why. If your corporate information system ran a diagnostic like technical systems do, what would it find: Clearly assigned authority? …Lipservice or effective execution? …Alignment of rules, rewards, tasks and objectives with required information, or not?
Most computer systems test the state of technology. Information systems test the organization; the decision systems your employees need to be in good working condition.
Feeling Scattered, Too Busy Working To Accomplish Anything? You May Have an Information Deficit
If so, an information designer can:
- Identify, create and leverage information assets (Information Arbitrage) A Simple Information Work Question: Which three, not all twenty–two, documents contain and identify the 17 low cost changes that completely alter the user’s interaction with and perceived value of the product, or service, or web site?
- Show you …How captology can promote change, replacing systems designed to lock down the status quo. …How systems can persuade users to bridge silos, where classical construction techniques hardwire political boundaries in silo–centric vertical computing structures.
- Is the way your invoices are designed causing receivables lag and cashflow problems? Captology techniques can break dysfunctional paterns.
- Reveal a Content Strategy which makes your CMS work more like information technology and less like data storage. (Hint: this point is directly related to the first one)
- Work with you to design an information work training program. What the term information literacy should cover — but doesn’t, including decision streams; information flows; how to create an information backchannel; information–based performance measures, and the creation and use of information tactics.
- Create visual information designs, what graphic and infographic design should be for an information age. Visual design techniques which instantly draw the eye toward information, when most graphics depend on the viewer as the hardest working part
- Change physical store merchandising from data (percent off, price) to information. Doing so can increase sales up to 42%, even as high as 49% (A billion dollar kitchen and bath retailer uses information merchandising developed on the Web in their physical stores)
- Increase the information content of the project development process. Communicating information rather than dumping data over walls between silos creates a better product with less friction.
- Explain why information glut is a contradiction in terms, and a signal data processing is being passed off as information work.
Nobody Ever Got Fired for Understanding The Information Part of Information Technology
If information is important, simply ask the people in your organization just what information is. Ask management to explain the difference between a CTO and CIO. Ask the computer trainers, the techies, and the information professionals to articulate the practical difference between data and information. Don’t settle for new buzzwords for old fashioned data processing.
A Few Words Of Advice: If the answers you get are not explicitly about decisions and how decisions get made, then invest in a few short minutes to talk with me.
In those minutes you and I can discuss how information can be defined. Then, if you feel my ideas about information will benefit you, we can discuss how defining information changes how you interact with technology. Contact me at the link below and tell me how and when to best talk with you.