Organizing the sharing of information

The ‘I’ for IT in this particular title refers to me, myself and I, meaning: where is the user in Information Technology? The accepted way of designing large IT systems has been to focus on information, its creation and management. We grew up with Create-Read-Update-Delete. Users that were not allowed to change information were granted rights to view. And thus we created application after application for our users. And then came the internet.

Along with the internet came User Centered Design. Online we are completely used nowadays to develop starting from personas, putting the user in the central position. What is their information need, what terms do they use to find information? New people with a different skill set entered the workforce, developing internet sites that published tons of information. We lost focus on the process of information creation. Information simply existed, or was created for the purpose of publication on our website. We lost the ‘I’ in the internet.

Neither party, old school IT nor internet renegades, really organized the reuse of information. IT did not recognize the need, because the overall user perspective was lacking. Internet did not wait for existing systems and solved missing information in isolation.

Reusing information in an organized way requires a new, broader, vision on IT systems and how they communicate or share information.

The figure above shows how we can combine the best of both worlds.

Example

A marketing manager creates product marketing collateral that is shared with the project manager. In this case the master data required is an id for the product involved. This enables the UI of the product manager to 1) know that this collateral which is a project deliverable is available and 2) enables the project manager to check the material if necessary.

Vice versa the milestones set by the project manager can be communicated to the UI of the marketing manager, which helps him plan his activities for the product launch directly in the context of the draft material he is working on.

Basically, each user group (represented by typical available roles in an organization) has its own UI where all information they need (either to access or to create/maintain) is available. Functionality for creation and maintenance is organized in the ‘standard’ IT way of working. Navigation, presentation is tailored to the user group is determined in the ‘standard’ internet way of working.

But essential is that the information that is viewed by one user group and that is maintained by another user group is re-published through a connection via master data into the UI for the viewing user group.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 22:53 and is filed under communication, information age. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.