Confidence is key. A sentiment that has been echoed across every facet of our lives; whether it be at work, at home, on the sportsfield or so on. Perhaps though, the area that is most crucial (and presumably the reason you’re reading this blog) is confidence in the decision-making you do within your organization.
Confident decision-making is based on your ability to draw the right insights and come to the correct conclusions for you and your organization. It is integral in achieving strategic goals, improving business efficiency, and ultimately, increasing your skills and capabilities as an asset within your organization. Here we look at three things you can be doing to ensure you are making smart decisions, confidently, in 2020.
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1) Cut through the information noise and find the critical insights you need
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2) Access the information you need, in real-time, to stay ahead in your industry
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3) Distribute information to your audience in a timely manner
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How do we know, you might ask…?
Well, after 20 years of operating in technology and information management, we know the business challenges that contribute to not being able to make these smart decisions and we know the solutions needed to overcome them.
In this blog, we’re going to take a look at the three main issues that we encounter frequently and know are affecting you and your organization. And, if we haven’t covered your own challenge by the end of this article – get in touch here or reach out to us at info@infodesk.com and let us know what it is that’s your primary information concern in 2020.
Let’s begin.
Challenge 1: “There’s too much information to keep on top of; I’m missing important insights.”
We often talk about the exponential growth in information, referring to facts and figures that can be difficult to comprehend; zettabytes, the data universe and so on. What these blanket terms fail to do is emphasize the scope of what this can mean in our day-to-day, both as individuals and as a wider organization.
The increasing availability of data means that the insights critical to your organization are becoming more difficult than ever to accurately identify. If you’re struggling to stay on top of the necessary information now, consider what this ‘data boom’ could mean for you and your organization moving forward.
Download our whitepaper on calculating the cost of information overload to find out more
The answer is to fight fire with fire. Technology is a primary cause of this overload; surely technology provides the solution?
Whilst there is an abundance of technology that could help organizations to overcome the challenge of information overload, three in particular spring to mind; search, targeted intelligence and visualization. ‘Search’ now gives you the ability to search all of your information with a single query, to uncover answers you didn’t know existed. Targeted intelligence has become so, well… targeted, that individuals can ensure that only the information truly pertinent to the smallest of niche interests is delivered. And visualization software, driven by AI and ML technologies, can now distill the most convoluted and complex data sets into malleable and digestible graphics.
These are only a few examples of how technology can be effectively implemented, not just to overcome the information overload of the data boom, but also as a way of building a competitive advantage for your organization in 2020.
Challenge 2: “How am I supposed to monitor my competitive/client industries to ensure I’m staying on top of the latest trends or industry challenges?”
Those of us tasked with providing ‘intelligence’ are similarly plagued by the prevalence of news and information. Whether it be competitive, market, regulatory, strategic, industry or any other form of corporate intelligence across an organization, each has its own yet similar challenges.
The dilemma of ‘intelligence’ is how diverse the information monitoring needs to be to stay relevant. From predicting market trends based on years of analysis and industry expertise, to tracking competitors’ daily share price changes, to identifying the latest piece of legislation affecting your market; all of this information is critical, yet couldn’t be much more disparate. Simply put, we are faced with too much information, changing at too fast a rate.
One of the key factors in solving the ‘intelligence dilemma’ is to ensure that all of the disparate information, so critical to your organization, is made available in a place that can be easily found – and from which actionable insights can be drawn. These user tools should be determined by employees’ needs, but ultimately must be underpinned by a technology that can bring internal and external sources together in real-time.
Challenge 3: “I can’t get critical information or updates to my stakeholders in time.”
Now that we’ve identified the tools and technologies to find your business-critical information in the proverbial ‘haystack’, how are we going to disseminate it to those who need it most? To use a somewhat cliched metaphor about data and information – it is the oil of future business. If this is true, it is an oil that needs to be refined, tailored and pumped into very diverse and distinct engines to ensure that we’re making the most of it.
Too much of an obscure metaphor? Essentially, information is only as valuable as the person who has it available to them. We, as the custodians of information within our organizations, are acutely aware of how important it is for us to uncover insights and intelligence critical to our organization. But we are also aware that it’s only of value if it can reach the right audience within the organization in a timely and relevant manner.
Again, technology is the key. In the same way that information users’ needs are becoming more and more tailored, so too are the means through which their information needs to be delivered. Whether it be via email, text message, app, portal, virtual/augmented reality – or another technology innovation we haven’t envisaged yet – isn’t important. What is important is that the means through which the information you are sharing within your organization is relevant and tractable to the user to whom you are serving it.
To ensure you have the right strategies in place to deliver information to your end-users in the way they need it, start planning now. It’s as simple as asking them to identify their preferred information delivery method – and while you’re there, why not stop and do an information audit to ensure the information being delivered is as tailored as possible to your users?
Understanding and addressing the problems your organization faces is the first step in being able to respond to the challenges and opportunities we will face in the new year. The three issues outlined above aren’t an exhaustive list, but we know that these are the issues most common to you. After 20 years of building the right solutions to meet unique challenges, we are perfectly positioned to help you make smarter decisions confidently within your organization.
If we’ve missed your biggest information concern for 2020, let us know here or email us at info@infodesk.com where we can discuss how we might help you meet that challenge, confidently, too.
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