Making information work for a living

Improve internal collaboration and communication.

Collaborative systems and information sharing are the lifeblood of most businesses. Everyone says so, it must be true. And yet many small and not-so small businesses are either stuck at the “sending emails to everyone@” stage, or have a moribund internal blog. Again, analysing the types if information that are flowing inside the organisation and seeing how they should should flow is the initial step in getting to grips with questions such as:

  1. ‣Blog, wiki, full Web-based collaboration tool or something else? Different types of interaction demand different tools.

  2. ‣Information categorisation: There’s a trade-off between the effort that goes into the initial tagging, classification and filing of information and the ease of retrieval. Where does the balance lie? Formal taxonomy, informal tagging (folksonomy) or leave it to free text search?

  3. ‣Build in-house, buy an off-the-shelf package or use a hosted provider? I can help you assess the technical merits and the financial implications.

  4. ‣Cultural implications. Getting the right tools in place is only half the job, how do you design it so that  people will use it? Without ubiquitous use from people who matter, the new systems will wither.



Extract valuable information from your business, present it accessibly.

An “information audit” is a simple yet thorough process that examines the information that a business is generating then assesses each piece’s value. This value can be extracted in many ways, from improved internal decision making to improving a customer’s Web site experience. Some businesses even find that they can generate enough data to create indices and information with PR, marketing or even saleable value. Once that data has been uncovered, I can:

  1. ‣Set out the options for exploitation

  2. ‣Work with designers to create consistent templates and ‘visual vocabularies’  that work across across multiple documents, presentations and diagrams.

  3. ‣Work with authors to ensure their ideas are expressed with maximum clarity.

  4. ‣Edit documents, and help structure longer reports to ensure consistent style.

 

You won’t find me talking much about Web 2.0 and Social Networking simply because the terms are ill-defined and prone to cause confusion rather than enlighten. But the technologies and approaches they embody can be extraordinarily useful, if used with proper care.

At Web 2.0’s core’s is the concept of letting users build a community by giving them control of Web site content. More cynically, it is a way to get customers to produce content that other customers will want to visit your site to read.

But the 2.0 moniker implies a technological disjunction, whereas in fact the technology itself is nothing new and the business logic is simply an evolution from the good old days of putting a support support forum online. Moreover, it implies an all-or-nothing approach as opposed to a pragmatic sliding-scale of interactivity.

At the simplest level, a company blog is a tremendously powerful way to humanise the face of a company and to promote team-members’ expertise. Enabling comments allows immediate garnering of feedback from customers and potential customers which can inform the whole enterprise.

And yet even a simple blog or forum requires commitment to keep making regular, informative posts. Building real trust requires demonstrating broad expertise in a subject domain, rather than simple expertise in the company’s products. The corporate blogging team also needs the skills to engage even the most disgruntled commentor in constructive debate.

In the spirit of do as I say, not as I do, I’ve recently added a blog to this site. And in the first post I explain exactly why it breaks the cardinal rules of corporate blogging. You can find it here.

Align Web and information strategy with business and sales strategy.

I don’t code Web sites. But I bridge the gap between the business and developers. Often the first step is seemingly simple - to ensure that the business has a coherent view its Web site’s goals. Sounds obvious? Maybe, but even a basic discussion of issues such as ‘who makes up the audience(s)? what are the key things we want to achieve?’ can often raise issues.  From there the basic tasks include:

  1. ‣Evaluating each element of the existing site’s strengths and weaknesses.

  2. ‣Proposing any new elements that will capitalise on the business’s strengths.

  3. ‣Building clear, unambiguous business requirements documents.

  4. ‣Ensuring clear, communication between the business and developers.