It's time to upgrade Document Control into INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Something wrong, Yes, I have seen many organizations are currently just practicing Document Control to manage their Information scope. Information is considered an asset regardless of what business and size of the company. Document Control is a subfunction within Information Management that has a clear scope and objective. Is document control sufficient to manage Information? Very tricky question and now we need to go back to the basics to understand more. 

What is Information?

Information is data, documents, records, and knowledge and it can be structured or unstructured. This explains the weightage of Document Control in the overall Information Management umbrella. Information can be defined as “The interpretation of data and document based on its context, including the business meaning of data elements and related terms, the format in which the data is presented, the timeframe represented by the data, and the relevance of the data to a given usage (DAMA) “

What happens when you focus on Document Control and interpreting Information Management is covered?

Many organizations believe that the Document Control function is sufficient to manage Information. It is coming from insufficient focus or ignorance on Information Management or in other words not being interested to utilize the maximum use of information. Document Control is a management function in any organization to manage the controlled document. These documents are numbered and produced as part of business or engineering progress. There will be a distribution matrix attached to every project that tells you how these documents should be distributed to the audience and finally handover documents to the operations/assets team. Document Control only focuses on less than 25% of the overall Information Management scope in business.

Now the questions are,

1. What happens to the DATA produced as part of these transactions?
2. What control measures are in place for the DOCUMENT (uncontrolled but may be important) produced during engineering or business actions?
3. How KNOWLEDGE is preserved for the future to manage quick and efficient decisions?
4. How the RECORDS are identified and what controls are in place to manage records lifecycle as it represents the evidence of business transactions.
5. How do you ensure the Information with temporary values is DISPOSED to avoid data inflation?

Sound interesting, right. Unfortunately, many firms are not really practicing Information Management in their business, and they haven't defined in what capacity Information Management needs to be with them to serve the organization's objectives and goals.

What is Information Management (IM)?

Information Management is the collection, storage, management, maintenance, and use of Information. Effective Information Management practices ensure the organization keeps the right Information for the right decision-making for the right person at the right time.

What are the key benefits of Information Management?

Let’s look at some of the key benefits of practicing Information Management seriously within their business. 

Muddled about the start, where to start?

A million-dollar question, before you start working focus your attention on the basic why what, and when. There are many ways Information Management can be designed for companies or projects or assets. But the proven practice as a first step is to design the Information Management Framework. IM framework establishes the authorities, supports, processes, capabilities, structures, and infrastructure to enable information to be a useful asset and reduce liability to an organization, based on that organization's specific business needs and risk tolerance.

What is Create, Manage, Deliver and Sustain?

These are some of the key pillars of every Information Management Framework design. The below Lifecycle components will be used to develop the key Information Management business areas based on your business goals. This helps any organization to draw the overall framework scope and convert them into the use case, business requirements and design the overall IM People, Process, and Technology scope.

How do you start as you are already Practicing Information Management but want to scale up?

Most are already in business and practicing it for many years. We are not too old for the change. Now you should be wondering what is the starting point for us as we are already in business. It's simple, take your first step and create IM Restructuring Roadmap.

Create a vision and scope, and define the lifecycle of your Information. The next step is to conduct process optimization, the most common goals are minimizing cost and maximizing throughput and/or efficiency. It’s worth conducting the current state analysis, gap analysis, and developing the To-Be specification to have a detailed plan. These lead to strategy and governance where the process, policy, SOPs, guidelines, and related technology and tools will be developed and implemented, and the changes will be communicated to user groups. Training will be conducted based on the user persona. The final step is to build a sustainability framework that should contain the adoption of best practices, adjust policy and related governing deliverables, audits, and build communities and groups for sustainability.

Summary

Simplicity is your best friend. Make simple Information Management practice and process and digestive communications for the user groups, business units, and teams from Non-IT or Non-IM groups, and apply the agile methodology in your program or practices where you apply continuous improvement and change based on learning as you grow.