Management Information - Yeah Right!

From Management Issues

"Many managers are unable to get their jobs done properly because they find it easier to get hold of information about their competitors than they do information about their own organisations.

That's according to a new survey by Accenture of more than 1,000 middle managers in large companies in the United States and United Kingdom which examined the way managers gather, use and analyze information.

It found that middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time - up to two hours a day - just looking for the information they need to do their jobs, and when they do find it, more than half of it is wrong or of no value to them.

As a consequence of this, almost six out of 10 said that they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just can't find it."

Pete's Points:

Yeah, well that's what they tell you when you interview them. Of course it is also in the interest of the company undertaking the interviews to highlight this "fact" - after all it feeds their business.

The reality may be very different.

For example, many managers are totally incompetent in the use of the Internet and their computer systems and so would not be able to find anything even if it was signposted and marked with bright fluorescent lighting!

Then there is the lack of adequate record keeping knowledge, training and practice in most organisations that started with the IT revolution as early as the middle 1980s.

"Stuff" is placed on line by a multitude of staff members - each equally eager to bring themselves to attention for their 'brilliant' contribution to the corporate well being. Given the fact that disk storage these days is so cheap that Google, for example can afford to give away (for free) over two gigabytes of hard disk space to ANYONE (and everyone) in the world who wishes to sign up, these staff members DO spend a lot of their time doing useless time wasting typing up stuff they have begged borrowed or in some cases stolen from others and stuffing up into the corporate intranet space. Thereby even further clogging the corporate systems.

Corporations these days no longer talk about megabytes or even gigabytes. Even the Terabyte is beginning to be too small a unit to refer to meaningfully as many individuals seem to want to have terabytes of storage space on their home PC 'networks'.

Hundreds of companies make a living - and a good living at that, convincing people that without their invaluable contribution of indexing and cross referencing tool suites or their invaluable statistical tools or their intelligent search engines based on proprietary algorithms etc a company would either go bankrupt or simply be unable to find stuff.

The question really is do we really NEED all this stuff? In a day to day operation when your staff costs are among the highest expenditures of your firm can you really afford to have people spending more than a quarter of their day fruitlessly searching for stuff? More to the point, do they need to?

Do organisations really need to have many more of their staff spending the best part of their day putting stuff on line that someone somewhere obviously thinks others need to read?

The reality is that too many people in too many organisations spend too much time trying to learn how to use the technology and not enough time doing the work that is required. The reality is that too few staff understand anything about information management. The reality is that too many staff spend hours of time paid for by end consumers, surfing the net or putting useless crap on to corporate systems that no one wants, can find or actually use. Finally, the reality is that so much crap now exists on corporate systems that it is not only difficult to find anything, but it is almost impossible to distinguish between the stuff that is useful and the stuff that is the garbage left over from years of neglected non record keeping!

I suspect that most managers with any sense at all, have one or more trusted acolytes surrounding them (usually personal assistants) or people who are totally skilled up in the use of the modern computing tools and it is these people whose entire job in life is to make the boss look good, regardless of the job description who perform the hard yakka of getting the information the boss needs, analysing it, presenting conclusions and suggestions and for THIS work, being protected, coddled and at least reasonably well paid.

All the time of course, the boss who literally would not be able to find his own index finger unless it was wagging in someones face is getting paid the BIG bucks for being smart and probably shopping on the Internet or chatting to friends, also in high places or making those executive lunches count while they schmooze their way to their next job or should I say 'career opportunity'.