Financial Service companies (and indeed others) spend an inordinate amount of money on Information Delivery, but are they really gaining benefit from this? Are they doing it in a cost effective manner and are they serving up the right information?



With issues such as no best practices, disparate technology systems, regulatory pressures and the demand for every increasing quality information rather than quantity companies need to make a stance and act now.



Financial Services Companies are realising that information and the provision of it to their internal and external stakeholders is vital, but they often lack a clear approach for delivering it. Consumers of information often find it difficult to obtain the correct information and sometimes receive conflicting information from different parts of the same company.



So what is the answer?

People need both food and water to survive. But not just any food – how the meal is presented and what it is made up of, are as equally important. Some people want a complete meal, not the uncooked ingredients as they might not have the time or skills to prepare them.

Consider a company and its need to be fed by information. Consider this "structured information" to be like "drink" – you need it regularly and it must be clean and of good quality in order to survive. A lot of companies do realise the importance of this and have their handling of this data well under control However let's take the "unstructured information", documents, emails, etc, – considering that as the "food". Again this should be of good quality, clean, well presented and hopefully a pleasure to consume. However when we come to look how some companies serve up their "unstructured information" it is often an unappealing stew.

A company Intranet for example may resemble a run down food market. The user has to find goods himself, often things are badly labelled, put in the wrong place, and out of date. The whole thing is stacked with items that are of no use to them. All too often it stinks! No supermarket would get away with it – and yet too many people are happy to treat their information that way. Some think that if you just pile it high with produce sourced from many different places then that will do. To make matters worse little is done about the user experience. Sometimes a lot of money seems to be spent on the "shop window" but when you get inside it’s the same old chaos.
Portals are often touted as the answer but if they are not part of an over all plan they can often be just like flashy food courts. Better organised perhaps but there is still the danger that the "food" being served is very poor and not what is really wanted. If the data behind a portal is not well managed then the consumer may well be faced with a very strange meal, some parts cooked, some cold, some down right rotten. As a platform for delivery portals are the right direction but they must not be seen as a magic bullet or treated in isolation.

So what should be done?

What is needed is a more balanced approach. It is important that data and its supporting documents are considered as part of the same balanced diet. The content of this diet must contain only good quality ingredients and it must be well prepared and served in an appealing way and should suite the needs of the consumer. A lot of time companies just buy expensive content management systems which help people get material on to the Intranet or Portal but not enough effort is placed on the quality and the relevance of this content – or indeed in ensuring that it is removed when past its expiry date. In short the governance is over looked. In some cases there may be quite separate initiatives to add document management in one area, records management in yet another area and maybe digital asset management in a third. All without any thought that they are actually different facets of the same thing, or considerations of the cost savings of a co-ordinated approach.

Different companies and indeed different users within the company will have different dietary needs when it comes to the information they need to do their jobs. Some are fast movers – needing up to the minute information to allow them to react quickly – others need more time to go over a wider variety of information and to chew things over for a while. Some want it at their desk, other want it on the move or at home. Some are happy to read from the screen, while others want it printed out.

What must be remembered is that busy business people need business information presented to their needs when they need it in order to help them make critical business decision.

One compelling driver that now must be taken in to consideration is compliance. Just as health & safety regulations have improved food standards so compliance should help encourage businesses to clean up their information handling. Compliance requirements mean that companies need to be able to be very open about where information has come from, where it is stored and how it is processed. Just as with food it is important that it is fresh, clean and properly prepared – consider it as food standards regulations for data!

What are the implications?

Companies need to take a more holistic view of what information they have, how it is looked after and served to the right people in the right way. This is not just a question of technology, just like preparing food is not just a question of buying the latest gadgets for the kitchen. The processes to look after the information and the people its intended for are just as important. Ownership is also a requirement, the various information needs to be owned and maintained by someone – with a overall information delivery owner guiding the process – in effect an information "chef".

Companies should look to a coherent information management strategy encompassing the handling of structured and unstructured information. They should define and standardise the way it is stored, labelled and handled and must consider all the different users and deliver channels it will use. This can help to decide what fits where and how it all should be labelled (shops are getting hotter on labelling our food – yet important documents and other vital pieces of information rarely have so much as a meaningful title).

There is also much money to be saved in taking this strategic approach. Many times Conchango has come across companies with multiple Intranets – set up by enthusiasts, with their own favourite technologies, who have then moved on or are too busy to maintain them anymore. This amateur approach may work well for a short period in special cases, but generally is a terrible waste of time and effort. Equally, if not more dangerous, given the increase in compliance, is the manipulation of management figures in desktop tools like Excel. It is very difficult to then audit and track such figures. Is holding key management information in hundreds if not thousands of spreadsheets sensible? Similarly having multiple versions of sales presentations sitting in different file shares, or on C: drives, can cause confusion.

So the importance of good well presented information both structured and unstructured should not be ignored. It should not be left to be handled by local solutions that are both wasteful and inefficient. Strategic consolidation of the approach to handling information should be seen as the goal. Too much critical intellectual property is lost without such planning. It is clear that this is not just a technology issue. However technology is still part of the issue, and it is important to again think strategically and look at Enterprise Content Management approaches rather than isolated document, records and digital asset management – think portals rather than stand alone Intranets and Extranets - integration is vital – provided it is supported by the right people and processes and senior management buy in.

Information processes need to be tailored to suit the company taking in to account the full information life cycle from creation through to archiving and/or destruction. There is a strong need to change the way people handle, store and use information. Such change management is a major component in any information strategy. It is also often thought of as a one off step, this is wrong, proper information handling and processes need to be part of business as usual. A healthy diet is for life not just for a few weeks after Christmas.

Napoleon said that an army marches on its stomach, recognising that to be effective, an army needs good and plentiful food. Just as a badly fed army will not fight well – a badly informed company will not compete well.