The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. – Laozi

This is true for this site in a couple of ways.

The journey of this site

This site was created in late 2020. What a year. It replaces an older ad-esse.net site I used to have. There are a few other abandoned domain names in my past too. This is the way. At this point in time the purpose of this site is to store some tests as I learn to code in Python.

The journey of IM

Information Management (IM) continuous improvements also begin with a single step. IM is a complex and adaptive system. Efforts to carefully plan large, complicated changes often lead to surprising / unintended results. Some benefits may arise from this, but mostly it leads to disappointment amongst the project team and executive. So rather than carefully planning out enormous sweeping IM changes, try starting with a single step.

A single step in business process improvement means getting down to the “2 pizza team” level and picking one business process to improve. The next step is documenting the information that gets fed into that process, how it is passed around to be transformed, and the information products that are sent out of the process. Once you have this information flow documented, then you can start to reduce duplication, improve your metadata (which will improve your search), and hopefully automate the process too. Often teams discover that a lot of the friction in a process comes from restricted permissions and a desire to see the same information formatted in different ways. Discussions into why certain storage locations are restricted and why people want to see the same data visualized in different ways can be an excellent team building exercise. These discussions are often an interesting way to explore interpersonal relationships from a different perspective.

When you’ve done one process with one team, then move to a related process in a related team. You can identify these related processes and teams by looking at the inputs or outputs of the business process you just completed. That way you will build on your first success, and you will also extend this success a bit farther in your organization.

A beneficial side effect of this approach is that it gives you a maturity measure for IM in your organization. If you find that you can map and improve a process quickly with one team, they will have well formed IM habits. If you find this exercise difficult with one team, they will benefit from improving their IM habits. When you start to see the cadence between teams you will get a sense of how far you have to go.