Calling the Kings of Clothes and Information!
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Have you noticed the graveyards full of failed IT and Business projects (and lost opportunities) due to misunderstanding and mismanagement of data/information?
Every company has them, and they represent a colossal amount of wasted opportunity, money and time.
The stark reality for most companies today is that, whilst many Boards battle with the ramifications of failing to manage one of their most important operational and strategic assets, most still remain in a state of ‘unconscious incompetence’.
In the ‘Old World’, managers managed silos, and the successful ones lived by the mantra, ’Information is King’.
Driven by the challenges of our complex ‘New World’, organisations are now waking up to the fact that information is a corporate asset, that ‘Information is King’.
Unfortunately, as few seem to have had time to learn and adapt to our ‘New World’, the majority of today’s technology spend, connecting up organisational data, information and process silos, will probably still end up in the project graveyard. These organisation don’t have a Culture of Information.
My hunch is that most large organisations today spend more time planning, and provide larger budgets to managing and delivering Starbucks and Costa Coffee type facilities in their HQ’s, than they commit to managing their data and information assets! These organisation don’t have a Culture of Information.
So how do we build the missing Culture of Information?
Learning to Learn...
A few years ago Eddie Obeng made me laugh out loud when he explained the learning process. It went something like this:
You start off blissfully unaware of your challenge e.g. you are ‘Unconsciously Incompetent’. An event or series of events (hopefully) lead you to become ‘Consciously Incompetent’. Once there, you have the choice/option to learn and practise new attitudes, behaviours and skills to become ‘Consciously Competent’. If you tried hard to learn and change the right things, you could eventually become ‘Unconsciously Competent’ and don’t have to consciously think about what you are doing to be good at it.
You’ll agree then that re-programming everyone to build a ‘Culture of Information’ is a hellishly complex, difficult, costly, and very long-term, change programme!
However, until this learning process starts, the King’s of Information and Clothes won’t be ready to ‘smell the coffee’ and adapt any time soon :-)
