Tool Box
Issue No. 35 - June/July 2007
The information Supermarket
by Pamela Brombal
Do you feel that the information highway has become the information supermarket? You are spoiled for choice, but you can't find the information you want, when you need it.
According to recent survey by Accenture, many managers in large corporations struggle to stay abreast of vital information, yet every day they are inundated with information that isn't of value to them. These findings won't surprise many people in business.
Tapping into quality information is vital to making informed business decisions. To get to the best information and minimise the low value information that gets in the way you need to develop a strategic approach for finding your way around the information supermarket.
Think of information as a key ingredient - you need fresh, quality material, delivered by reliable suppliers, and quick access to a stock of staple supplies.
Fresh source
Focus your daily business and professional reading to the key topical information that is vital to your role. Then narrow down your information sources to the best available information that can be delivered to you at the frequency and in the format you require.
Take advantage of alerting services to quickly skim the major developments from the news for your particular industry. LexisNexis and Infoxpress by InfoPronto have good email alert services that summarise the news from major Australian newspapers. Both services are very good for a quick skim read of the day's main news stories in bite-size pieces.
Also look for information services that are offering to push information updates to you via an RSS feed to either your email, PDA or blog reader. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is already a useful tool for receiving brief alerts to information from blog and media sites.
The regular newsletter isn't dead, but increasingly it will sit alongside RSS-delivered summary feeds of information for people who want th...
