According to an IDC white paper, 75% of workers suffer from information overload—from both quantity and diversity. We don’t have to look far to understand why at every turn there’s a new blog, wiki, survey, video, podcast and email. Here are 5 steps to convert this overload into overdrive by optimizing your information and empowering your workers.
1. Establish secure, global connectivity with a single access point
We live in a world of transparent borders where information may reside in various forms and various repositories. ERPs, CRMs, email archives and IM clients are only a sliver of the different data silos that we have today. Employees, partners and customers must be able to securely connect to information—irrespective of its source and its location—according to their needs and role.
2. Ensure users have instant access to both structured and unstructured information.
This is the business landscape that our customers, shareholders and stakeholders dictate. To really optimize information, employees need access on demand to respond to customer requests, process thoughts and deliver value.
3. Provide easy navigation through information
We cannot ignore user experience when devising strategies to optimize information. Allowing users to easily navigate information by clustering, structured navigation, graphical navigation or by utilizing facets enhances the quality of the experience and information they access. Navigation enables finding a single answer quickly as well as performing broad research, browsing for related pieces of information.
4. Enable users to extract contextual intelligence from information
The greatest value you can give your workers is contextual intelligence. The ability to understand how information from one source relates to data in another—while factoring in such things as your user’s role in the organization, relation to others and past behaviors—is invaluable.
5. Allow users to collaborate and share knowledge
Collaboration drives transparency between business units and departments and removes silos. It fosters synergy between employees, partners, shareholders and customers and enables growth. By providing collaboration techniques so that your employees can bookmark, tag and add notes to documents and search results enriches your information and enterprise as a whole.
With the average employee spending 15% of their time on failed searches, organizations must implement strategies to minimize the load and optimize the use of their information.
collaboration, contextual intelligence, IDC, Information Optimization, information overload, search navigation
Shared knowledge really resonates with me. As a sales manager with a leading consumer goods company crossed lines between business units is not uncommon. The ability to blur the lines and see sales and customer data really lessens duplicate work and helps us not just close the deal faster but also serve the customer better.
Being able to have easy access to customer data is every business’ dream. As a decision science expert the centralization of data along with the ease and speed to that data has greatly improve not only my business but also the decisions and foresight of my clients. Businesses are now better able to predict consumers needs and wants.
HW, GT, thanks for your insights. In my experience sales can be one of the biggest beneficiary of an integrated system. Customer data is indeed spread across a multitude of systems/business units in most organizations (CRM, Time tracking, tickets, Hoovers, etc) and is one of the easiest to optimize with great ROI. Just having a consolidated view of all these systems can help tremendously servicing and up-selling customers.