Organize strategic information

The challenge is to identify information structures that highlight the strategic values in order to render them easily searchable. One of the difficulties of information management is finding a basic structure that works not only today, but will continue to do so in the future. All too often, methods are introduced that become outdated after just a few years and must be revised. It is therefore extremely common, if not the rule, for all users to establish their own structure for both paper-based and digital information in order to accomplish their duties. However, because quality, searchability and accessibility vary, parallel information strategies evolve that are not shared by everyone. As a result, islands of inaccessible information are created, which can be disastrous for both competitiveness and financial performance.

Today’s technology is more multifaceted and customizable, ranging from free-text search, which often results in an unreasonably large number of hits, to yesterday’s limited keyword database, resulting in the opposite. A combination of certain mandatory criteria, a high degree of structure and free-text searching in a basic structure that is familiar to all employees is usually best.

Traditionally, documents may contain subject descriptions that are vague or specific, categorized by classes and types. An abundance of proprietary, industry-specific and even international standards can be found in this regard. Classification by industry at various levels is also a relatively common approach to creating information structures.

A more modern approach is to search a large mass of data using automated key concepts. Searching the Internet is one typical example of this approach and tagging text and images on Facebook is another. When combined with traditional methods, correlations are also created between the different data sets in a database archive system.

Information must be categorized according to various manual and automated search criteria, which means that it must be well-structured based on a given strategy. Spending the effort here – especially with respect to strategic information, often the basis for important business decisions – will more than pay off in good organization that allows quick access and improves competitiveness.

We usually structure information based on existing data sets that are adapted to an updated and revised structure that ultimately contains a reasonable combination of existing and new data.