Dear all
As promised I am sending transcription of notes from the discussion we had during the last Intranets Forum meeting - Subgroup "How to change culture" (about sharing data).
We talked about:
1) the appropriateness of speaking of "Change management" instead of "Change culture". Simple change management initiatives can be very successful in order to motivate and prepare people to share information overcoming the fear of breaking rules policies or privacy, though they may vary considerably from the small charity expectations (where people need to be interchangeable and therefore share almost any procedure) to large auditing / accounting companies (where conversely compliance and confidentiality are the first requirement).
Effective light and simple policies can foster "safe" habits almost everywhere, like:
- sending links to docs stored in central repositories and digital archives instead of full-text documents as attachments;
- protecting documents with passwords.
2) the idea that there is a link between information management and levels of creativity / innovation / ingenuity. This assumption motivates some directors / non exec directors / project boards to invest in change management initiatives and it has been recognised that... "it sells". Nevertheless, I warned about the evidence that some developments and innovations (especially from BRIC economies) show there is not such a direct correlation between the two: we probably need to be more cautious and manage this assumption / perceptions with regard to management of risks and maturity levels and references to lot of other complementary issues that may depend on compliance as well as cultural factors. For instance, it is undeniable that a better organisation in terms of contents management free time of staff from "fluffing around" searching for data or documents ad libitum...
3) The above "reasons why" (time saving / time management and better productivity) seemed one of the main advantages of having intranets contents organised in manageable chunks, for instance at department level or - ca va sans dire - indexed with some sort of human controlled metadata process in place.
Kind Regards
Brunella Longo
7 New College Court
London NW3 5EX
T +44 (0)20 72095014 / 77229184 - +44 (0) 75 49921488 (mobile)
http://www.brunellalongo.info (http://www.brunellalongo.it)
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