4.2 Stage 3, part 2: Technology and information/content
4.2.2 The audit process
deploy them within the business – exploitation activity needs to be carried on in parallel with exploration of new tools and technologies that might be deployed to help the business achieve its objectives.
1.3 Are there any issues regarding access to information outside the organization’s core information system, such as:
(a) Remote access by staff with laptops? If so how sat- isfactory is this and does it support current business needs?
(b) Access by staff via hand-held device or laptop? Are bandwidth/security protocols adequate but still suffi- ciently flexible to allow reasonably productive use of information?
(c) Access to information by partners/suppliers (via extranet).
1.4 What are the key content creation tools in use (e.g. Word, Excel)?
(a) Are skills in these considered to be adequate?
(b) If non-standard, is this a barrier to sharing and dissemination?
1.5 Does the organization have what could be described as a
‘portal’?
(a) If so, is this front-end access to an integrated system, a
‘home page’ linking out to different ‘sites’ on a variety of infrastructures around the enterprise, or a mixture of the two?
(b) Does the system have transactional capability to allow users to interface with back-end systems (e.g. personnel system to notify change of address)?
(c) How is information delivered to users (do they have to seek out and search for information, or are there ‘agent’,
‘alert’ or other ‘push’ systems in place)?
2 Discovery and information management 2.1 Does the organization have an intranet?
(a) If so, how many intranet sites does the organization have?
(b) How easy is it to publish on the intranet?
(c) Are their issues with dated or erroneous material?
(d) How is it kept up to date/by whom?
(e) Is there formal ownership of material?
(f) Is approval required for publishing and how is this managed?
2.2 Does the organization have a content management system to manage intranet publishing?
(a) If so, how many people can/do use the associated publishing tools?
(b) Is there an approval process built in (workflow)?
(c) Does Web content have a ‘lifecycle’ including automated deletion?
(d) What sort of metadata is associated with published content?
2.3 What sort of search tools does the organization have?
(a) How easy is it to use the search tools?
(b) What sort of indexing of content is done?
(c) Does this extend to other information repositories such as file stores?
(d) Is there a classification system or taxonomy in place for published material?
(e) How easy is it to use this system, and is it possible to bypass it when publishing material (e.g. as raw HTML)?
3 Collaboration and expertise
3.1 Does the organization have universal access to email?
(a) If so, is there a single integrated address book?
(b) Is this integrated with other directory information such as phone numbers?
(c) Is coping with email volume seen as a problem (by users, by administrators)?
(d) Do people send large attachments through the email system, or do they link to files in public folders, shared drives or document management systems?
3.2 Is there a database of skills/expertise available?
(a) Is this openly accessible, or restricted to managers?
(b) Is participation voluntary? If not, where does the content come from?
3.3 Does the organization use a groupware suite such as Lotus Notes?
(a) If so, how are databases/data sources managed?
(b) Who does the database development (in-house team, local ‘clued-up’ users, external developers)?
(c) Are there constraints on deployment of new databases?
(d) How are things like data integrity and ‘end of life’ of databases managed?
(e) Are groupware collaboration tools (such as shared calendars, discussion groups, online chat, whiteboard tools etc.) in use? If so, who is using them, and for what?
3.4 Are there any other ‘collaborative knowledge management tools’ such as whiteboards, video or audio conferencing in use?
(a) If so, who is using them, for what, and to what extent?
(b) Are outputs stored/shared or dumped after use?
What should emerge from this process is a fairly clear and accurate snapshot of the organization, though of necessity it will be an incomplete picture – for any very large organization, it won’t be possible to quickly move to anything like a compre- hensive ‘log’ of information sources and uses (for example, one customer organization recently completed an exercise to create an information asset register – this took several months, logged literally thousands of sources from external news feeds to document repositories and groupware databases, and it still hasn’t delivered a strategy for managing it all – though they are working on it!). Nevertheless, the learning gained from such an exercise is invaluable when it comes to feeding into the strategy process – uncovering which areas are going well, which require additional support, which have been neglected, and which are the most promising new areas and issues for intervention and development. Indeed, taking a fresh look at an organization’s information systems from a KM perspective can provide useful insight, and it can help focus the overall IT strategy on the specific information needs of the business.
Some surprising findings may emerge – one organization of just 5000 people found that fairly lax controls on development in Lotus Notes had left them with more than 11 000 different Notes databases – more than two for every user. It was estimated that more than half of these had fallen into disuse – but it wasn’t clear precisely which half. Equally, it wasn’t known how many of these were used for things like contact details, and how many times these details had been captured and stored in different places around the company. For all the relatively low impor- tance of the individual databases concerned (at least to the enterprise as a whole) the overall impact in terms of information policy for the organization was substantial.
Another organization had more than 400 ‘intranets’ – ranging from stand-alone ‘this is the team’ workgroup-driven sites created in static HTML using a basic editor such as Microsoft FrontPage, to more sophisticated sites which had been set up by business units using external designers and databases of content. An effort had been made to create a directory of ‘home pages’ and at first glance it looked as if the organization was a fairly progressive one.
But behind the scenes it was actually a nightmare – no common standards (whether of page design and feel, technology, or information), extremely basic search tools that ‘missed’ most of the published content, and no ownership of content post- publication (which meant that content could not be trusted to be current and relevant). Needless to say, the whole concept of
‘intranet’ had a fairly poor reputation in that company – it was associated with unmet expectations, as users had consistently failed to find what they were looking for. This is an extreme example – but parts of this story are fairly typical in organizations where information technology strategy has struggled to match the growth and change over the past decade – an all-too-common phenomenon when the rate of change facing both public and private sector organizations has been accelerating rapidly.
It should be noted that there is one commonly used information audit approach that we specifically don’t recommend: the
‘knowledge map’. The authors believe that while it can be useful to map out some of the main information flows when analysing business processes (whether at the macro level – across the value chain – or at the micro level in working to improve specific processes within the business), and certainly worth pulling together a list of ‘approved’ information sources into some kind of information asset register, it is a pointless exercise to attempt to map out all the knowledge and information within an organization, and attempt to show the links. As the KM pioneers Thomas Davenport and Larry Prusak say in their 1997 book Working Knowledge:
Organisations contain such a vast amount of knowledge, that mapping it would be a futile endeavour.
4.2.3 Moving forward – the technology