Introduction

In the final analysis, the reason why intranets fail is because organizations fail to understand the value of information as a business asset. Imagine for a moment that your company has built a factory and fitted it out with all the machinery needed to manufacture a new product. For any company that is a considerable investment. Or perhaps your company has built a large new office block with a sizeable car park and a good staff restaurant. Again, a considerable investment. Now I want you to imagine that it has forgotten where it built the factory and where the office is located. You will say that it is just impossible to imagine that. No company would be so incompetent.

Now imagine that over the last ten years you and your colleagues have been writing reports on competitors, market prospects, new products ideas and business strategies. All this information is stored somewhere on shared drives or in attached files on a Microsoft Exchange server, but the people who stored the information have now left the company. Will you say that it is impossible to imagine that, and that your company would not be so incompetent? Unfortunately, this situation is much more common than you might imagine or even fear. Even where an intranet exists, corporate information is stored in multiple repositories – among which the intranet is just one.

There is now some hope that situations such as this will gradually become relics of the past. For much of the late 1990s, and on into the 21st century, there was considerable interest in (if little commitment to) the concepts and practice of knowledge management. Many considered that the post of chief knowledge officer was critical to the success of the organization. Few such officers now remain, though good practice in knowledge management is now well developed.

The fundamental problem that organizations failed to recognize was that without effective information management gaining a competitive advantage through knowledge management was very unlikely. Now the focus is turning to information management for competitive sustainability.

Information management and information

governance

The term ‘information management’ is becoming more widely used in management circles, but it seems to have no accepted definition. Indeed, while I was writing this book a search on Google for definitions of ‘information management’ yielded over two million hits.