Power Potential of Information

POWER!  Isn't that essentially what organizations and individuals seek in order to achieve increasing success?  The power to do more with less, the power to earn more business in a competitive market. Organizations and individuals utilize resources (assets) while implementing various means of  harnessing or generating power with those resources. For example, people are frequently called the number 1 resource of organizations and they are  often required to complete training courses. Training is a means of increasing the capability of individuals in order to apply that capability toward the achievement of some specific end. If individuals in an organization are considered as components of a machine, the energy they are able to exert over time (enhanced by training) contributes to the overall power output of the machine. Information is another resource and the degree to which it's capabilities are enhanced and harnessed is directly correlated to the amount of power output from the information. 

Now let's look a little deeper.  Training a person is orienting and organizing a person's natural capabilities in a specific direction.  Information is "trained" when it is correlated with all information in the domain and thus transformed into knowledge, which is the power-producing form of information.    

Google Tech Talk: PIM

Establishing a mission and vision

The following are the thoughts of Eric Denna, who has had many years of experience helping organizations develop strategic plans. I asked him to evaluate my rationale in helping my company develop goals and objectives. This was his answer:

"1. Whom do you serve and what do they (those being served) need to do?
I find, invariably, that organizations are very imprecise about who
their target customers are and what their customers are trying to do.


2. What services do you provide so they (those being served) can do
what they need to do? This is essentially a catalog of services
provided by the organization and a straightforward explanation of how
the services provided help their target customer do what they need to
do.


3. How do you know you are doing a great job? I have learned that
the more straightforward and simple the answer to this question the
more precise the answers to questions one and two. If someone needs
more than five pieces of data to evaluate how they are doing I start
getting nervous.


4. How do you provide the services? These are the processes for providing your services to your target customers.

5.
How should you organize? This includes information about the
organization structure, decision rights, resource distribution...


It is always an interesting experience to have a leadership team
answer these questions as to what is and then get them to reconcile
their answers. They learn an enormous amount about their organization,
particularly when they try and reconcile their answers.


I then turn the conversation to answering each of the five questions in the "should" form:

1. Whom should you serve and what do they need to do?

2. What services should you perform?

3. How should you know you are doing a great job?

...

When
answers to the first form of the questions disagree with answers to the
should form you have an opportunity to clarify vision/objectives.

The first three questions are the critical ones when
focused on vision/strategy."

I am thinking that these questions can be useful in helping individuals or families set up appropriate goals and objectives to help them achieve their personal vision as well.

State Transitions

In this post I have to state some definitions up front. An organization or a family, or an individual can each be considered a system and in this discussion, I will use the word system with that in mind.

A useful analysis in the design of a system is a state transition diagram. This is useful because it reveals events and actions our system must manage and perform -- events and actions transition the system to states.

We might begin by considering the potential states in which our system can exist. With a clear understanding of the states, we can begin to describe the events and actions our system must manage and perform that transition our system into each state.

Now let us consider the case of an individual as a system. First, what are the potential states of an individual? There are many ways to describe states of individuals and much research and study has gone into understanding human behavior over the centuries. I will illustrate a couple of simple states as described by Gordon B. Hinckley, the late President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in his book entitled "Way to Be!".

The first state he describes is "Be grateful". You may consider this as an action, but think of a grateful attitude as an attribute of an individual -- a way to describe an individual. Now, how does one transition to that state? What events must be managed to transition one to that state? What actions should one perform to transition to that state?

Another state he describes is "Be smart". What events transition an individual to that state? What actions facilitate the transition? This a good example for making a point about states in general. I consider states in themselves as modes of operation or ways of living for an individual. In other words, the general state of being smart consists of intermediate states that collectively describe the lifestyle of "smart".

Personal Information Management and Family Life

I am wondering about the connection between family stability or at least family life level of satisfaction and personal information management techniques, skills, or practices. I think everybody manages information in their lives whether they think about it or not. I just wonder if how well that is done has any relationship to a level of family life satisfaction. I'm not suggesting that personal information management should be some kind of formalized practice in a home (although whether formal or informal, it is done). I am saying that if individuals will give serious thought to their own information management-related activities, they will increase their own level of family life satisfaction. It is really an element of a broader concept of Time and Life Management.

Collaboration

One way people either gather, modify, use, or obtain information is through real-time collaboration with a specific end in mind. I just discovered a real-time collaboration tool at Thinkature.com. I know there are multiple tools providing this basic capability, this is just one I hadn't heard of before. Like any useful real-time collaboration tool, it apparently now comes with voice chat. I don't see here whether it can enable screen sharing -- I doubt it -- that is a function that other real-time collaboration tools provide.

Personal Information Management

Studies have been done on a variety of topics in the information management field. I am particularly interested in topics under the sub-heading of "Personal Information Management". Several teams of students at the University of Washington studied the following topics:

Folders vs Tags for organizing information
Factors contributing to abandonment of IM strategies
Putting information in its place in a digital age
Planning to organize personal information
Human cognition and personal information management
Information behavior
Human behavior related to information

I am intrigued by these topics. I intend to continue delving into some of these topics in the coming weeks and months.