Business Leaders Need to Understand Information Flows

I was fortunate to sit in a business meeting that was discussing a large-scale project, equivalent to building up a facility. In the meeting, there were a lot of areas to pay attention to, for instance, the budget and cost, and cost versus quality, followed by the materials need to come in a certain order at a particular part of the facility so that it can be build up properly e.g. cement for the walls need to be in first before the tiles.

The business meeting triggered the thought in the title for me, as the chair of the meeting was determining how to ensure that the overall project did not go over budget while the project was finished on time. I won’t go too much into the details but it made me think that going forward, managers will need to know how to design information flows within the project or process they are managing. With that I would like to share how I will design such information flows to ensure that a project, be it small or large, can finish on time, on budget, and of course less frustration along the way.

Designing Information Flows

As any business or individuals continue to operate in an era of digitization and transformation, they will have to work closely with data and information. The relevant data and information will need to reach the targetted individual on time and the quality of the information needs to be effective in helping the individual or organization to make a well-informed decision. Let us work backward then.

Individuals

Individuals need information at their fingertips to work. There are a few dimensions to look at it.

1. Timeliness: information needs to reach the individuals at the moment it is needed. It can arrive early but it should not be accumulated to an extent that the individual is juggling with them.

2. Effectiveness & Presentation: information needs to be presented concisely so that the individual can digest it immediately. For instance, “Go to the car park.” vs “Move your legs to the place where there are a lot of cars that are stationary.”

3. Quantity: information needs to be handed over at “just enough” level, only give enough that is needed to achieve the objectives of the mini-tasks or decision point.

4. Channel End-Point & Accessibility: information can be at the individuals’ fingertips easily. Should the information be given to the individual via tablet, mobile, radio, etc. Each channel has its strengths and weaknesses.

Channels

The channels are also important to the information design flow as well.

1. Source: Was the information obtained from good-quality data?

2. Processing: How should the data processed into the information?

3. Bandwidth: Can the information at the needed quantity and quality be sent over quickly? Sending a dashboard vs a small table of numbers.

Any others? :)

Information Architect…Information Flow Designer?

So here begs the question… should forward-looking companies look into getting what I may call an “information flow designer”? I initially was thinking of the title “information architect” but its job scope has been defined with very subtle differences from what I am proposing in this issue.

Based on search results, an information architect “designs the structure of information in a system or environment to make it easy for users to find and navigate”. This means that the information architect works on a data/information pool and ensures the search cost is low, whereas what I am proposing is designing flows in a way that individuals in an organization receive the information they need timely.

Your thoughts? :)

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