Decision-driven Information Management

You enter the office, thinking what expecting you during the day, taking your time before you get to your desk and you know why. You nervously login into your email application and find out that you have 651 emails to read! and all you wanted is to have a short vacation with your wife and the kids... In the information age, we sometimes challenged with having too much information and limited capacity to handle it. But how can we make sure that we consume or produce only relevant information?

In a business environment, information is only relevant if it supports taking decisions. Why is that? workers has their responsibilities and personal objectives they should achieve (e.g. achieve 20% market share). They do it by taking decisions (e.g. buy/build decision). In order to take good decisions, they need good information (e.g. how much it will cost the company to build a new product). Thus, generated information must be driven from business decisions needs.

To have an efficient decision making process, we need to focus on relevant information. In the industrial age, we produced physical goods (outputs) out of raw materials (inputs); we considered this process to be efficient if, “a given quantity of outputs cannot be produced with any less inputs”, according to Wikipedia. Similarly, in the information age, we make decisions (outputs) based on given information (inputs), and focusing on good information will promise efficient and productive decision making process.

So what makes information relevant? First, as mentioned above, it must be relevant and driven from decision making needs; if the information does not support taking the decision, than it is redundant. It also must be complete with enough details but no more than needed. The information also must be accurate in a satisfying manner. Finally, it is better that the information will be simply represented so it can easily be consumed by others.

Managing information with a decision-driven way-of-thinking can be clarified by revisiting the way corporates analyze their Competition Landscape. Usually what happens is that they research every aspect of the competitive landscape (holding a full-time geographer for that...) – from distinctive competence to SWOT analysis, from product lines to customer base, etc.. Is all the explored information support decisions that should be taken? probably not. Instead, they should retrieve information which is required for specific decisions, e.g. In which market segment I can play the leader? Which of my competencies is perceived as unique and I should focus on?

Next time you get or generate information, ask yourself if it support a decision you or one of your colleagues need to take. If the answer is no, you can throw it away.