And, even if you don’t recognise the fact yet, your business already relies on information. The amount of data the world produces increases every two years, according to researcher IDC. Such an astonishing level of growth sounds incredible.

But further visual context is provided by IDC, who report that the digital universe grew by 62% to almost 800,000 petabytes in 2010. A petabyte is a million gigabytes, or a stack of DVDs reaching from the earth to the moon and back.

Your business is probably creating its own equivalent DVD stack as we speak. From structured information stored in databases held in stovepipes, to unstructured data spread across emails, social media and PDFs, every organisation is struggling with the same problem – big data.

For most organisations, the amount of information being created is spiralling out of control. Poor data control results in ill-informed decision-making, where executives make judgments with no real understanding of an organisation’s health.

The only answer is to take a strong grip on analytics and to implement business intelligence (BI) software, a real-time technique that will help your organisation analyse its knowledge base and provide reports that help boost executive performance.

Integrating BI, through rigorous internal processes, will allow your key people to make timely decisions. Examples of successful BI are not just confined to the private sector and also include some leading edge public bodies, such as Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust.

The specialist NHS body’s data is currently held in multiple systems and displayed using Excel spreadsheets. To provide real-time information, and to produce customised reports on performance, the Trust has spent £4.3m on a BI and data warehousing platform from Advanced Business Solutions (see further reading, below).

The resulting Integrated Information Centre may seem like a large investment at a time of public sector cuts; however it is key to helping the Trust increase financial control and improve decision-making processes for citizens.

The long-term payback, therefore, is clear. With an effective BI solution in place, organisations like Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Trust can finally control their data and harness its true potential.

Further reading:

http://www.advancedcomputersoftware.com/abs/news/tees-esk-wear-valley.php

Is your data in good health? is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

The amount of digital information grew 62% to 800 billion gigabytes during 2009 when compared to 2008, according to research from EMC (see further reading, below). The 1.2 zettabytes of information expected to be created in 2010 would be equal to every man, woman and child on Earth “tweeting” continuously for 100 years.

The problem is not going away either. More than 60% of chief executives (CEOs) cite industry transformation and the information explosion as the most significant factors facing their organisations during the next five years, according to IBM (see further reading).

And if the CEO is concerned about a technology issue, then you know you have an important issue on your hands. So, how can the business cope with the surge in demand for knowledge?

It is a crucially important question. Data comes in a number of structured and unstructured forms. These multiple forms create stoves of information that are useless unless the business can understand what data the organisation holds and why.

Understanding such questions will allow the business to ask the most important questions of all: what does this information mean and how can we use it to serve our customers better?

To answer such questions, you need to get a grip on information management. As a starting point, data warehousing techniques – a repository of organisational information – must be allied to broader business objectives.

Create an interface that allows your workers to understand what is actually being held in the warehouse. Then use carefully selected analytics to successfully navigate through the ocean of business data.

Such navigation does not have to be a rough ride, either. Careful integration can allow employees to make real time decisions based on data they can trust.

The effects of the information explosion continue to radiate outwards. But the right technology tools will help you control the impact on your business.

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Further reading

http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh062810-story01.html

http://www.ameinfo.com/231603.html

Manage your information to control the explosion is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

With attitudes like these is there any wonder that so many knowledge workers feel disillusioned in the work they do? As Lucy Kellaway pointed out in the Financial Times on May 11th 2008 in her article “Aim Low To Find Meaning In Work”, she has found that there seems to be a widespread melancholia in the work place. Or at least with the people who read her newspaper.

It should not be like this. 40 years ago Peter Druker, the management sage, saw that we were entering a new age, an age of the knowledge worker. He said in the Harvard Business Review November-December 1969 that the great management task of the late 20th century would be “to make knowledge work productive ……….. just as to make manual work productive was the great management task of the last century”.

So how successful have we been? Clearly there has been some progress in knowledge workers productivity. We have seen the application of Taylorist techniques. In some areas this has been a success. For example call centres where the use of IT systems combined with productivity measures has led to a whole new industry being created. There has been a massive increase in personal productivity software, such that we all now produce our own documents to a level of a junior typist. We can add up a row of numbers as quick as an accounts clerk could do. Finally, we can all produce presentations to bore our colleagues and customers at the click of a button using helpful templates.

There is an interesting paradox here though. As the number of what we used to call white-collar workers seem to rise inexorably what they seem to produce does not. It is often difficult to see what they are actually doing. Like me, in my Dad’s eyes, are they working, or just pinching money?

Let’s look at a concrete example, the line manager who drives a Toyota car, for instance. In the last 10 years his car will be significantly cheaper and significantly more reliable. The management information he receives will probably cost a lot more and be less reliable. Surprisingly, productivity tools for knowledge workers have tended to make them less productive.

There are several factors that can be identified in this.

People have desktop tools that enable them to spend a lot of time processing data. We can now churn out position papers, background briefings and sales proposals that would have astounded our forbearers. That is until they actually read them. Anybody who has recruited people will know what an eye-opener it can be when you ask candidates to supply a hand written page of A4 about why they want the position and consider themselves a suitable candidate. As someone who is involved in constructing sales proposals, I dream of being a customer and asking my suppliers to explain in one hand written page why they think they should get the business and then asking them to come and present this without using a single PowerPoint slide.

People like to be busy. We make a displacement for the meaninglessness of our work, with the sheer volume of it. It is a sort of therapy on the company’s time. Many people like to be busy at work, where you have a certain level of seniority and respect and where problems tend to be fairly easy to sort out and you can be seen as some sort of hero. This is in stark contrast to home where none of these factors are true.

People like to be viewed as indispensible. Everyone knows in his or her heart of hearts that no one is indispensible. We are just small cogs in the wheel. Yet I often visit companies that if one or two people left the organisation the flow of information would stop. They are the only people who have any understanding of how the inter-locking spreadsheets that produce everything from the final management accounts to project profitability fit together and work. The funny thing is that these people are usually quite junior in the organisation and do not seem to be behaving this way for the money.

The costs of producing information in organisations are often hidden. No one really knows what it takes to produce information in the business, how many people have handled the final numbers and how much time have they spent in handling the data.

It may be that these productivity tools are actually part of an elaborate smokescreen. We assume that people want to know what the real situation of the business is. We have to ask whether this is realistic. Organisations are political structures in which people naturally want to exercise power. One of the questions I always ask executives is whether they, or their organisation, really do want business intelligence since it depends on a commitment to shared definitions, reliable and consistent measures and most importantly a willingness to base decisions on facts, not opinions dressed in numbers.

Measuring knowledge workers. is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment