Do we over-communicate?

by Gerry McGovern

The more information we disseminate, the more value we create, right? Wrong. Bombard your customers and employees with too much irrelevant data and they’ll switch off. Managers must learn to tap into the killer content.

In the past 20 years there has been a revolution in organisational behaviour. This revolution involved email, the web, instant messaging, texting and, most recently, blogs. It is a revolution in – wait for it – writing. Yes, writing.

Never before have managers written and read as much. The question is: are we maximising the value of our writing and reading? Right now, the answer is “no”.

Data management is one of the trickiest challenges facing today’s organisations. We create vast quantities of data and we need a suitable method of storing all of it. What we’re really talking about here is an administrative rather than a true management challenge. It’s about storage in a data warehouse. You can find stuff but usually only after a long and difficult search. And the quality of what you find could well be suspect.

Think of an iceberg. Below the water we have that huge data warehouse. Above the waterline must be the intranet or website containing the truly useful content that is needed on a daily basis.

Common characteristics
During ten years of working on the web and having consulted in 35 different countries, I have noticed common characteristics to organisational information. Invariably, 95 per cent of the information a company produces is irrelevant when it comes to producing value today. There is, however, five per cent of content that has major value creation potential.

The problem? Data smothers content. Data is like weeds in the garden. The flowers (content) will not flourish unless you do regular weeding. Data eats up those precious resources: time and attention. This problem is particularly acute on many intranets. In many organisations, these are vast sprawling spaces filled with all sorts of stuff, much of it out of date, more of it totally irrelevant to helping staff do their jobs more efficiently.

Most websites and intranets are simply not managed. They have no clear strategy or vision. Buying content management software is not a strategy. I have seen content management software make websites much worse, much faster. If you’re in a hole with your intranet the answer is to stop digging, not buy a JCB.

A friend of mine is a manager with one of the world’s largest, most profitable and most efficient companies. Every day, he gets 100 internal emails – 85 of them are irrelevant to his job and waste his time. This is a firm that is ruthless about maximising the value of its production processes. However, when it comes to its information processes, it is, like most organisations, in the Stone Age.

Principle of scientific management
Frederick Taylor looked at the job of shovelling coal in the Bethlehem Steel Mills and thought that there had to be a better way. Over time, Taylor developed his principles of scientific management. Today, we need principles of scientific content management. We need genuine management thinking here. It won’t come from traditional chief information officers or information technology managers. It’s like Peter Drucker says: these people have spent the past 50 years focusing on the “T” in IT. We need people who focus on the “I” – the information.
Organisations have been brought up on the economics of scarcity. We instinctively feel that the more we produce, the more value we create. There is a voice inside our heads telling us that the more emails we read and send, the more productive we are.

Never before have organisations had so much to say. And never before have people had less attention to give. It is estimated that the mind can process 114 bits of information a second. A conversation is estimated to take up 60 of those bits per second. (That’s why we find it very hard to listen to two conversations at the same time.) If you barrage your staff and customers with meaningless data, they will switch off. As a manager, you must seek out the killer content – that finely honed, perfectly pitched message. That’s where the value lies, and that is what content management is about.

This is a truly exciting time. The way we work is being reshaped. The opportunities for managers who learn to maximise the value from content is significant. Content is a hidden asset. It takes management to tap it.