Information Sharing Rut

Warning Signs
Look down at your desk. Do you see bills, proposals, faxes, memos, and random notebooks? Looking up at your monitor, do you see a desktop filled with icons or inbox containing thousands of emails? Do you store your Word documents on your computer? When you need a document or a piece of information do you have to ask multiple people?

You are not alone. Chances are if your work environment is in this state so is your employees and coworkers.

These conditions are indicative of a company in an information sharing rut.

Symptoms
The symptoms of being in an information sharing rut are loss of time, company knowledge and the inability to quickly react to the needs of your clients.

Cure
Luckily an Information Sharing Rut can be cured with a dose of modern technology. The best cure is a well thought out Intranet, whose primary goal is to share various types of information within teams and organizations. Intranets typically have the following features.

Document Management System
Saving a document into a document management system makes it discoverable and accessible to all members of your team. A few other features available in document management applications are:

• The ability to categorize documents as proposal, plans, specifications, applications or other categories that you define.
• Ability to quickly search for documents using keyword searches.
• Ability for teams to collaborate on documents while maintaining version control.

Shared Calendaring
This allows you to see your co-worker’s schedules. It typically alerts you when your meeting is nearing and allows you to manage and track meeting invitations and disseminate meeting agendas.

Wiki
This is website that is editable by everyone. The most popular wiki is wikipedia. Imagine being able to structure your organization’s knowledge so that every employee can contribute. Wikis are searchable and quickly becoming a popular way to share information.

Blogs
Blogs allow a person to organize and share writings or posts with a public or private audience. Blogs are searchable and allow for categorization of content.

Finally, Information Sharing Ruts waste time, money and energy. An Intranet enables you and your co-workers to quickly find and view the information needed to make timely decisions.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.