Locating And Accessing Information
Being able to locate and access the information being created within your organisation in as quick and easy a manner as possible is clearly a vital issue. Failure to achieve this risks user frustration, wasted resources and potential difficulties in complying with legal requirements. It would seem logical that such factors are most likely to surface during the active use phase of the lifecycle for the obvious reason that this is the phase during which information will be most regularly accessed. However, it is also important that a longer term perspective is taken which also considers how access requirements may change over time. This is because information which is no longer being actively used on a daily or weekly basis is less likely to be found through proximity (i.e. appearing in your recent documents) and intuition and will be more reliant on the quality and logic of the measures you have put in place to describe it.
Unfortunately information description is not an area where most users excel. Information creators often resent having to manually add metadata to their resources and this needs to be borne in mind when designing or implementing any information system that is heavily reliant on user-generated metadata for content retrieval. Even if the completion of metadata fields is made mandatory there is no guarantee of the quality of data being provided with abbreviations, spelling mistakes and format inconsistency (ie how dates are expressed) dramatically reducing the quality and usefulness of the metadata being gathered.
In an ideal world systems should be designed to automatically generate as much resource discovery metadata as possible, either from information already known to the system (e.g. the user's name from the system login) or from the particular part of the process they are performing. Allied to this it is preferable wherever possible for any additional metadata required to be 'fed' from other systems which contain the definitive version of such information (for example providing staff names direct from the HR database). As well as ensuring the accuracy of the metadata such cross-system integration should also help facilitate cross-system searching.
Should this level of system integration not be possible there are still measures which can be taken to improve the ease with which information can be located and accessed. The Managing Information to Make Life Easier Guide has some good practical advice which you may find of use in this regard.
At the very least when creating a new system or process it is important to consider who else needs to know of its existence within the organisation and how they can obtain access to the information its produces. Individual 'silos' of information whose contents are known to and accessible only by a single member of staff is seldom helpful. Not only does it severely limit the usefulness of that information but may also make it difficult to provide an accurate and complete answer to a Freedom of Information request or other legal/regulatory discovery exercise. Perhaps the most overlooked example of such a silo is the average user's email inbox whose (considerable) contents remain accessible only by the individual user.
