Information Relevance

As I posted before I believe that we need to be extremely selfish with our attention. One very productive way to start doing so is by ranking the relevance of the information we get from our systems and from our peers. Think of it: do you have someone you trust whom you ask about the best movie to watch? Yes, you have that. And for restaurants and books to read...Now think again: do you have anything like that in your company? Do you have your trusted sources for the best information about your company products, the competitors, your sales numbers,...?

And now think about this: can you rank the relevance of the information in your corporate systems? And can you rank the relevance of different people as information sources related to specific topics? If I can do what?? mmm, so then how do you think you're optimizing your attention?

I was very glad to discover that the most relevant topic at Gartner's Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit in London last week was exactly Information Relevance. And the good news is that the use of Web 2.0 technologies and the combination of automatic and social relevance mechanisms are gaining ground: ratings, social networking, tagging, folksonomies,..., are now present in the discussion and generating great interest amongst users.

An attention economy inside the firm- end to the attention robbers!

Information is growing at unprecedent volumes. Organizational complexity driven by the need to compete in global markets is also growing at very rapid pace. We're in the process of adapting our enterprise models to a new reality.

What is the scarcest resource in the new environment? Our attention.

I think that our companies should have a mechanism to punish the attention robbers. Here are some examples (you can think about the punish yourself):
1- Those who write endless emails, instead of taking the time and effort of making it short, clear and concise. Why do they assume we have the time to read them?
2- Those who cc everyone in the emails they send just to get noticed. Without asking for it, they require you to devote part of your attention to reading it and then deciding that it was useless for you.
3- Those who celebrate meetings where the outcome for you is zero. Why did they ask you to go in the first place?
4- Those who start the exposition of an issue to be solved with their opinion, instead of starting with the facts. Why don't you let me get to the conclusions myself? It's going to be shorter than listening to your conclusion and crawling back to understand the facts to then get to my own conclusion anyway.
5- Those who IM you or text you with no real issue. They force you to adopt defensive mechanisms like not using IM and just trusting that any real important stuff will find you.

One easy way to reduce your cost of coordinating a meeting

Imagine you want to coordinate a meeting at the earliest possible day and you have two groups of people: 4 girls with ages around 14 years old and 4 PAs of corporate executives. Who do you think would get it first?
Probably by the time the 4 PAs have exchanged the 20 or so emails saying when each one of the executives can and cannot and which would be the best location...etc. the 4 girls are already finishing the dessert.

If you feel like the executive and the PA but want to react like the girls try this http://www.doodle.ch/main.html

The mystery of transaction costs, Information Management and Organizational Design

....or why your company may not survive an era of Google outside and not inside.

The traditional Theory of the Firm used to explain that jobs performed inside the firm implied lower transaction costs than those performed outside. In essence, the firm avoids the necessity of using the price mechanism for performing its actions, and instead it is replaced by the direction of managers. The moment the cost of performing those actions inside the firm is bigger than performing them outside, then that transaction will be performed in the market. Two of the most relevant transaction costs are the cost of finding the relevant information and the cost of coordinating activities.

Today there are two dimensions that have significantly altered the relationships inside the firm and the associated transaction costs: (1) technology and (2) knowledge-intensive works.

1- We've seen the development of IT that has brought interaction costs down to nearly zero in the modern world. Talking to someone in a remote location, or accessing corporate information is today a very easy task. However, the difficulty of accessing the appropriate information inside an organization these days is growing all the time. We've all experienced situations in which finding information outside our company is much easier than finding it inside.

IT and Information Management are today disciplines that play a key role in maintaining the entity of the firm. If Search technologies, Enterprise Content Management, Business Intelligence systems are not effective inside the company, the cost of acquiring the relevant information simply goes to high and the reason to work for a firm looses a lot of sense.

2- Frequently in modern companies, knowledge-intensive complex and value added tasks need to be performed by groups of individuals that have to collaborate. However, the design of the organization does not make it easy to collaborate: silos, departmental walls, make it difficult to collaborate.

If organizational designs do not facilitate collaboration, sharing and interaction, another important cost of transaction goes high and another reason to keep the firm united disappears.

The two aspects mentioned above are probably the biggest threats to most of the modern corporations. I'm reading with interest the book "Mobilizing Minds" that explores some of the above mentioned issues and I hope it Will provide me with some answers.