By Bob Boiko. Originally published in three parts in December 2005 and January 2006. This version is excerpted from the earlier version. All excerpts come from the manuscript for Bob Boiko's 2007 book Laughing at the CIO: A Parable and Prescription for IT Leadership (CyberAge Books, 2007), reprinted here by permission of the author.

The bad news is that it is way too early in the development of information management (IM) to expect it to run smoothly. It will be generations before electronic forms of information dissemination show the same standardization and professionalism as print has shown for centuries. Without consistent and clear guidance from you, the leaders of your organization, technology groups working on IM problems can only guess what systems to build. As if that were not enough, the very computers that we would use to manage information were not built for the purpose. They can deal only with data, which is a pale shadow of the information we really want them to deliver.

That’s enough bad news. The good news is that even in these early days, you can make information management work well enough. With common sense, a few good mental models and methods, you can lead your IM groups toward delivering measurable value...

To get you as quickly as possible to the point of this article, let me present you with the short-list of what I think every leader should know about information management.

• Information is normal stuff. It is no more or less than the usual stuff we read, hear, and see.
• Information matters. I suppose if you did not already believe this, you would not be reading now. But why does it matter? Information is the way your organization presents itself and it may also be part or all of your organization’s product.
• eBusiness is business. All organizations do business. In the electronic world, there is little new to learn about your business itself, but a lot to learn about how business is transacted.
• Information will not manage itself. The natural state of information in today’s organizations is chaos. To rein in this chaos, you need to understand how information works and you have to be committed to managing only very important information. Then, you must create a standard collection and distribution process that overlays but does not damage the very non standard creative process your contributors all use to originate information.
• It’s early days for information management. We are at the very beginning of what promises to be a long-term, tough, world-wide struggle to redefine our means of communication. It’s not too early in the struggle to bring your information under management. But be prepared to make slow progress.
• You can be relevant to IM. You can stake out a position relative to IM that allows you to lead and guide your teams without interfering or becoming bogged down in the details of their work. You can also lead and guide your peers and managers with a firm focus on information and value.

Information is the Usual Stuff

Debates rage on about what is and is not information... I’ve given up on these debates, feeling like it might be better to use different words rather than trying to pin such a vague one down. Information, it seems, is just one of those terms that means something different to everyone.

But it is the natural term to use for the subject matter we are discussing. I’ve often used the word “content” as a sort of stand-in for information, but except in specific circles, the word content does more to obscure than clarify my meaning. So, I want to use the word information, but to avoid the tiresome debate I want to stick to a very common sense definition. Information is all the common forms of recorded communication we are interested in consuming, including the following:

• Text, such as articles, books, and news.
• Sound, such as music, recorded conversations, and readings.
• Images, such as photographs and illustrations.
• Motion, such as video and animations.
• Computer files, such as spreadsheets, slide shows, and other proprietary files that you may want to find and use.

This definition gives us a very clear and simple starting place for understanding information management: Information management is collecting up and delivering the sorts of recorded communications that we all want to consume...

It's Not Data Anymore

Information is not data. Computers were built to process data. Data consists of small snippets of computer information--numbers, words, images, sounds--that have much of the human meaning squeezed out of them..

...beginning in the 1990’s we somehow decided that we want computers to deal with more than just data. We want them to deliver us information that is rich in context and meaning. We all want computers to do more than finely grind through mountains of snippets. Today, we want computers to sift through mountains of large, complete chunks (not snippets) of information and deliver the ones that they want most at that moment. In addition, we want computers to deliver information of the quality we have come to expect from more familiar sources of information, such as books, radio, TV, and film.

Although users' needs and expectations have changed, the guts of the computer have not. Ten years ago, most people came to computers to input, process, and output data. Today, most people come to find and consume information. Unfortunately, at the base of all computer technology remains the assumption that you can reduce any problem to a set of simple instructions and that information need be no more than small context-free snippets....

The trick to information management, in an age when the technology is still data-driven, is to effectively use the data technologies to store and deliver, but not to understand information. Today’s computers have the capability to store massive amounts of information. They have the ability to automate the delivery of information across a variety of platforms. But they have no ability to automate the understanding of information. But, if you take the time to fully understand your information, you can augment the information that you store with an additional data profile of the information (metadata) that a computer can use to store, retrieve and deliver it. If your consumers can figure out how your simplified profile relates to the information they are looking for, they will be able to use the data to find the information...

If I have left you with the impression that today’s information management is a time-consuming, round-about and error-ridden method, good. It stinks, but it is the best we have at the moment... 

Information Matters

Most organizations say information matters, but behave as if it did not. In the large majority of organizations that I have worked with, information is treated as a necessary evil on the road to more significant activities...

On the other hand, I’ve never met anyone who would disagree that information is critical to their organization’s success. Everyone agrees that we are in the information age and that information is an “asset.” But these amount to no more than empty platitudes with no actionable statements to make them real. Is there a reason beyond the vague gut feeling we all have that information matters? I think there is.

Information matters because it is an incredibly powerful motivator. Information well designed and wisely delivered will pull people toward what you want them to know or do...

Information is also important as an actual product or output of an organization. Many commercial organizations sell information, governments output information such as laws, regulations, and policy statements. Libraries supply information to patrons. Non-profit organizations put out reports and recommendations. All of these organizations produce information like a baker produces bread. So, given that your organization wants people do know or do certain things, you will have to pay close attention to information..

Information Will Not Manage Itself

The jump from print to electronic distribution of information has created enormous opportunities for an organization to get its information to important people. However, if you want to effectively use information to present your organization to the world and especially if you want to distribute an information product, you have to manage that information. Managing information means organizing and overseeing the process of information creation and distribution across a variety of creators, consumers, and delivery platforms. It can get complex fast...

You Have to Know Information

As the leader of information for your organization you ought to be the first to recognize and promote the idea that information itself is a subject of concern...

People from the data world are fond of saying that they deal in structured information. They expect that every bit of information will be neatly ordered in the rows and columns of their databases. The stuff they don’t like dealing with cannot be stacked up neatly in their databases. They call this stuff unstructured information or, if they want to be more kind, they call it semi-structured information. I have just called this stuff information. To them it looks like a massive mess of random documents that have no consistency and no structure. In one sense they are, of course, right. Our organizations are full of documents that are hard to categorize, and would never be able to be picked to pieces and put in a database. In a much more important way, however, they are dead wrong. Our documents may be inconsistent, and they may be hard to categorize, but if they are worth looking at they are anything but unstructured. In fact, they are extremely structured.

A good document is the result of someone agonizing their way word by word, sentence by sentence, trying to find just the right structure to have a desired affect. The better the information, the more carefully and artfully it is structured. It’s not the kind of blatant, simplistic and repetitive structure that you find in a database. It is a subtle intricate structure, always converging toward a point, always logically progressing, but never too repetitive lest it bore us...

Unfortunately for someone rooted in the world of data, but fortunately for normal people, the structure of each piece of hand crafted information is different. The emphasis is on interest, not conformity. In addition, as subtle as the structure within a piece of information might be, the structure of the relationships between that piece and others “like” it may not be subtler still. It is more often than not left up to the consumer to figure out how one piece of information is related to others...

...Unless and until the hyper complex structure of normal information is reduced to the trivially simple structure of data, computers just can’t deal with it. So, in order to allow computers to deal with the sophisticated structure of our everyday information, we use much simpler data to describe it. This metadata (literally data about data) can be used by the computer to encode the structure of the information as well as its relationships to other data.

What does this all mean to the information leader? It is up to you to recognize and promote the ideas that:

• Information is not unstructured, it is hyperstructured. The complex structure of information is the very reason it is valuable. Its structure is to be preserved, not squeezed into a standard mold.
• A big intellectual effort is needed to figure out what data can be added to the information to allow it to be stored, retrieved and delivered automatically by computers.
• An even bigger and more expensive effort is needed to review each piece of information and add the appropriate data to it.

It is a paradox that never ceases to amuse me that making things simple is the hardest job.

The more you dig into the structure of the information your organization holds, the more you realize the magnitude of problem of bringing it all under management. The prudent way out of this dilemma is to bypass the large majority of information and bring only the most important items under management.

You Have to Know Process

Information originates in a fundamentally creative, usually individual, act. It consists of human beings with something important to say having the skill and determination to say it well. The management of information, on the other hand, is a pretty mechanical task. It can require highly trained and intelligent people, but at its base, information management is like a factory...

The information leader does not have to work on the factory floor, she doesn’t even have to design the factory process and machinery, but she does have to fully appreciate what it takes to build and maintain that factory...

A well thought out and rigorous IM process encompasses and integrates the needs, abilities, and attitudes of contributors, consumers, staff, technology, and information. It promotes the creative process needed to originate information but overlays it with a set of templates and guidelines that enhance consistency and reduce the amount of effort needed on the information factory floor.

It's Early Days for Information Management

I am of two minds concerning information management. On the one hand I truly believe that the change afoot is as great or greater than that caused by the invention of the printing press. On the other hand, I believe that there is nothing new here. All organizations have always used information to present themselves and some organizations have always distributed information as their product.

How do I reconcile these two positions? Well, just as eBusiness is just business, electronic information management is just information management. However, just as the means of doing business has been unmoored from the constraints of time and space, information management has done the same... I see two intertwined phenomena at play in this twisted reality.

• First, the people who have traditionally been in charge of important information have not always made the transition to the new channels we have created.
• Second, people who were never supposed to be professional information suppliers are now called upon to do so. Until recently the people who were not publications professionals, but still produced information, were left alone to figure out how to produce their information and who to distribute it to.

In the old days (a scant 10 years ago) of print publication, there were tried and true methods and job roles that assured a quality product. Writers, editors, designers, illustrators and printers all worked together in a tight knit group to produce publications that were of use to the organization. The publications department was responsible for publications. Their world was stable if inglorious. The tools they used, even when they went digital (a scant 20 years ago), were designed for experts. Training was assumed. The format and structure of the publications they produced was also stable. In short, printed materials have been around long enough that their production is a thoroughly conventional process. Not so electronic publications.

...With the rise of easy to build Web sites, anyone could, and did become a publisher. Most of those who rushed into the new field had no background in “classical” publishing. And since the trained publishers were mostly absent, they were left to create, or not create their own practices. Their proud declaration that they were inventing the future was left unquestioned by the people who should have known that they were just repackaging the past...

...Authorship, once reserved for people who made a profession out of it, exploded to contain anyone who had anything to say to anyone. Before the internet, an author was someone who wrote for a living. After the internet an author became anyone who can type and has knowledge that their organization wants them to share. Today the large majority of information that is published on the Web is created by people who have another job. Even if they wanted to care about the information they produce, they would not know where to start...

[Editor's note:] While I'm deliberately avoiding comment on most of this--as a long-time computer analyst and programmer, and as a longer-time writer, I can't let this paragraph go by without flagging it. When has it ever been the case that most authors "wrote for a living"? Certainly not in my memory, certainly not given the average income of freelance writers, certainly not given that--long before the web--the average number of books per author was less than two.

It’s early days in the world of information management, but I believe that history will be on our side. If we really are in the information age, then eventually treating information with care and respect will become the norm...

You Have to be Relevant

Technologists excel at building systems that satisfy constraints. They are less good at identifying constraints. Many systems fail because the engineers that created them didn’t know about an important constraint...

...To be fair, technology groups often include business analysts whose job it is to figure out how to get projects to align with business goals. But the best analyst in the world is only as good as the support she gets from those in the organization whose job it is to know what the business goals are and how each business unit can forward them....

So someone in the organization needs to lead even the best IM teams. Without this outside person keeping the team’s eye on the real prize, at best they will stumble toward strategic systems, in the most common case, they will just stumble...

Being Relevant to Your IM Teams

What IM groups should look to you for is perspective, wisdom, and overall direction. You can provide all of this and more if you try. But before you can become the strategy guru for your IM teams, you will have to clear away any debris that may have developed over time. Here is some of the debris that I have seen that blocks people from approaching their executive management.

“He is clueless. He has no idea what we are doing. It’s embarrassing to even talk to him about it.”

“She thinks she knows what we do better than we do. On the basis of no evidence or experience, she tells us in micro detail what to do. When her ideas flounder, she is not around to help pick up the pieces. Better to avoid her.”

“We have no relationship or rapport. I only ever get directives from him. I can never get on his schedule.”

“She doesn’t know any more than me. When I have asked advice in the past, it has not helped or it has been obviously wrong. I’m afraid to ask for advice because I don’t know what I’ll hear.”

“He is always busy at the higher levels of the organization. I’m not a priority so I don’t expect consideration.”

“She yanks us around too much. He provides new directives at every meeting. He never remembers the old ones that he made us change direction to work on. It’s too jarring to the team to include him.”

It seems to me that these criticisms boil down to “She’s interfering,” and bubble up to “He is irrelevant to our work.” In either case, the IM team avoids the executive because he or she has nothing of value to offer the team. If they felt that the executive understood them, brought new information to the table, and would not thwart their current efforts, they would surely come for help.

So how do you stake out this position between micromanagement and no management at all? To me the answer is right there in what IM groups generally lack and why they often fail— they don’t know how to judge the value of the systems they create. You can fill this gap by having a clear idea of value in your own head and by holding the IM teams to that idea before and during their projects...

Being Relevant to Your Bosses

Your IM teams probably do not expect you to lead them if you have not been leading them so far. Your bosses, on the other hand, surely do expect you to lead the IM teams. They should also expect you to be the person who knows what to do with the organization’s information. However, your managers are no more (and maybe less) enlightened about information than your IM teams. ..

So what would it mean to be an executive who is in charge of information, and relevant to her CEO and board? In essence, I believe it means that you are always ready to comment on how the appropriate distribution of information can help achieve an objective. If the Marketing Officer says “we need to expand to a national presence.” You should be able to immediately suggest ways that existing and new information systems can help make that happen. With a small amount of effort from you and your staff you should be able to present a cogent plan for how information could support the initiative and moreover, to what extent information could support the initiative..

...Technology always costs a lot but is not always worth it. Without you to help them figure out what technologies are worth the cost, they are left these options:

• Replace you with someone who does know.
• Look askance at all technology expenditures because they don’t know what else to do.
• Insist upon a return on investment (RIO) as the sole justification for an IM system. As I explain further in XXX, not all IM systems do or should save money.
• Let technology run rampant in the organization without serious oversight or constraint (the 1990’s approach)

So, it is possible but not easy to be relevant to your both the people you report to and the people who report to you. To be relevant, you have to have figured out a lot about your organization’s information and how you can squeeze value out of it....

© 2005-2007, Bob Boiko All Rights Reserved.