Management
Issue No. 10 - April/May 2003
A File by any other name?
by Sally McLean
“What’s in a name?”, Shakespeare once asked. “Everything” seems to be today’s answer. Nomenclature, taxonomy, lexicography, cataloguing, classifying—or whatever name is chosen for ‘naming’ (that in itself being paradoxical)—is the cornerstone of records and document management, a key enabler of information and knowledge management.
Information and knowledge management is now one the top 10 initiatives for most corporations. Harvard University suggests that up to 40% of a company’s worth does not appear on their balance sheet. Further, they speculate that most of that 40% resides in information and knowledge.
Every organisation exists to produce a product(s) and/or service(s). The renowned economist Adam Smith defined the four fundamental means of production as land, labour, capital and enterprise. Information and knowledge are the enablers of enterprise and therefore a critical asset for every organisation.
Information and knowledge comprise a single asset class that should be managed holistically. Where that information or knowledge resides (eg: data in an application, records or documents in a warehouse, drawings or plans in a compactus, content in an intranet or knowledge in people’s heads) is unimportant. What matters is the understanding of which information is important to the operation of the organisation and how to access it; information and knowledge must be actively identified and managed.
University of California research suggests that there is now approximately 250 Megabytes of information for every single person on earth and the figure is going up—in some cases, exponentially. The time to start prioritising and managing your information is now!
The information belonging to organisations is usually highly fragmented. Finding information spread across the organisation, pulling it from separate repositories and connecting it so it bec...
