PMcrunch

In today’s information intensive world, managers are inundated with information from many sources, especially social media such as blogs and wikis.  This presents a world of opportunity, but also a challenge in moving ahead. The opportunity is that there is far more valuable information available upon which to base decisions, and the challenge is how to sort through the information efficiently. Let’s take a look at some ideas on how to cope with all this information.

The opportunity
More information, primarily thorugh social media technologies such as blogs and wikis, presents a great opportunity. Decisions can be based on information that provides greater certainty and greater certainty for decisions made.  More timely information provides more current information for new decisions, and rapid feedback about decisions that have already been made.  This permits rapid adjustments to be made. More information provides deeper and more fine grained information rather than summaries and general average period. Much of this information comes directly from people speaking frankly and from direct experience.

Challenges
The opportunities are balanced by the complexities in managing that information. It is complex and time consuming to sift through exponentially increasing information.  Part of the difficulty is maintaining a perspective on the quality of information available. For example, reading blog posts certainly provides tremendous insights. Interacting in blogs and forums provides greater opportunity than ever before to interact with markets and stakeholders than ever before and in geneuine ways. However we also must recognize that not everyone is participating in blogs and forums. In addition the messages we need to hear are not necessarily the messages spoken the most frequently and the most loudly. There are often also ‘imposters’ participating, and that needs to be filtered.  We need to become very comfortable in assessing and understanding what these online environments can actually provide.

Online social and collaborative environments are changing the culture inside and outside organizations. Inside organizations, there is greater control over how the information is organized, and greater control over policies for using blogs, wikis, and other forums. This can make it easier to derive a clear understanding from the information within our organization. External social media on the other hand can provide great and potentially fairer information, but it may also provide some distortions, and perhaps skewed conclusions if we are not careful.

Basic Organizing of Information Happens Up Front
Going back to the fundamentals, the best way to use the any source or information is to start with our own purposes in mind by simply asking the question:

"What am I looking for?"

By doing this we can best find and sort through the conversation and information threads in blogs and wikis that we want.  We can even create the conversation and information threads that we want to generate our own message and feedback loops, almost like going out and directly talking with people.
____________________
John Reiling, PMP
Project Management Training Online
Lean Six Sigma Training Online