Information management

An arti­cle by the gen­eral man­ager of Microsoft Ukraine, “Personal effectiveness in the age of information overload”, which ran in the pre­vi­ous issue (No. 25) of Investgazeta, a Ukrainian busi­ness weekly, set me thinking.

If we take time man­age­ment to be a tool for orga­niz­ing work effec­tively, work that is most often tied up with large flows of infor­ma­tion, then we can widen the idea and add tech­niques of infor­ma­tion man­age­ment to it.

I may be making some method­olog­i­cal mis­takes here, but I hope not too stupid ones :) Wikipedia has a different view of what information management means.

So, infor­ma­tion man­age­ment is a set of tech­niques for man­ag­ing per­sonal and cor­po­rate infor­ma­tion flows in order to extract the most useful data from them, orga­nize and store it, limit the “infor­ma­tion noise”, and orga­nize the work process effectively.

The tasks of infor­ma­tion man­age­ment (info-management):

  1. Extracting the infor­ma­tion you need from many sources;
  2. Arranging these sources so they don’t intrude (man­ag­ing incom­ing mes­sages so that they arrive at the right time and don’t dis­tract from the work at hand, but don’t get for­got­ten or lost either);
  3. Organizing and pre­sent­ing infor­ma­tion in a form that is con­ve­nient to store, process, search and work on together;
  4. Cutting down the number of unnec­es­sary (dis­tract­ing) messages;
  5. Getting the infor­ma­tion employ­ees need to them (includ­ing tasks and the data needed to carry them out);
  6. Organizing the flow of doc­u­ments in the company;
  7. Organizing a per­sonal or cor­po­rate knowl­edge base (this is already some­thing close to knowl­edge management).

The result of suc­cess­ful infor­ma­tion man­age­ment is better con­cen­tra­tion at work, and so higher productivity.

I think it’s pre­cisely the inabil­ity to con­cen­trate, when mes­sages and news come in from all sides (email, mes­sen­gers, calls, Twitter and social net­works), that will be (and already is) a big prob­lem for employ­ees, and so for their managers.

To sum up: tech­niques for man­ag­ing your per­sonal infor­ma­tion flow are a promis­ing subject :)