Managing Information, the life blood of an organization

Information is King it is said.  However, rarely is information even obtained within most major corporations.  Most only reach the level of having huge piles of data.  Data that is not even verifiable or in a form that could be used.  There are multiple sources for the same data sets thus bringing into question the integrity of any one of the datasets.

When data is available as reports, those reports – which do now provide information to the employees – are so numerous and cumbersome that they are not properly used for any decision making.  In one of my client companies, they had 2000 reports that were created in a month for their middle and top management.  It is anybody’s guess how much else those managers would be doing apart from looking at the numerous reports during a day (if at all they were being used!) – much less making decisions based on that information.

Reports are created for two purposes:

– Decision-Making
– Postman-delivery

In the first one, they are used by a manager to make decisions.  The reports created for the second purpose, are used by someone at the next level to aggregate with other reports and passed onto to the next level.  For example, the Corporate Sales Manager collects Regional Sales reports and aggregates the numbers adds a column or two and passes that information to the Marketing Director.

If the Organization is the Person, Information is the Blood.  Is this blood of any use if it has no direction?  Even when it has a direction, what use is that flow if that has no purpose?  And when there is a purpose, can it be of any value to the person if it cannot be managed based on the external conditions and emergencies faced by the Person’s body?