Kathy is the office manager for a large corporation. The great news is that the company is growing and Kathy is looking for employees to handle all the new clients. The bad news is that she has no office space for these new employees to work in. The truth is, the office and storage areas are full of filing cabinets and the desks are covered in stacks of paper. The worst part is, Kathy and her staff don't even know what all that information is. It's no surprise that Kathy can't find space for new employees as she is wasting it with massive amounts of files and paperwork.
Does your organization have offices, file cabinets, storage rooms, and offsite facilities full of unidentified paper files and electronic documents? Are there files in your office that you've never opened and probably can't identify the contents? Have you ever come across a piece of information you didn't know whether to save or throw away, so you saved it, just in case? If so, you are working in an "Information Toxic Dump!"
Research shows that 80 percent of the information kept in most offices is never used. Ironically, the more information that is kept, the less it is used, simply because it's too difficult for employees to find. Often employees can't even find the documents they themselves created -- let alone any information created by another employee -- especially someone who is no longer with the organization.
Why information management really matters
Your ability to accomplish any task or goal is directly related to your ability to find the information you need when you need it. Finding information in every organization -- regardless of whether it is in paper or electronic format -- is becoming an ever-increasing challenge. This inability to find information causes all sorts of problems for the organization and for the individual -- wasted time looking for information or recreating already-existing information, missed opportunities, and increased stress, which results in increased health care costs.
Who is responsible for the problem and what can be done about it?
Blame for the information management debacle falls in several courts:
- Management blames employees for the problem
- Employees blame management for the problem
- Organizations don't have a user-friendly system
- Employees aren't trained on the filing systems
- Management fails to look at records management as an ongoing activity
To create and maintain an effective information management program, you must answer the following six questions: