Collaborative Information Management: 5 things you need to know

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As an Information Manager, you may often feel like your colleagues don't understand all of the tasks that you complete in order to protect your organisation's information and reduce risk. Here are five things about your role that you may want your colleagues to know.

8 March 20177 mins
Collaborative Information Management: 5 Things You Need To Know

As an Information Manager, you may often feel like your colleagues don't understand all of the tasks that you complete in order to protect your organisation's information and reduce risk. Here are five things about your role that you may want your colleagues to know.

As an Information Manager, you must work with various different departments across your organisation to ensure compliance and protect your enterprise's most valuable assets. But even if you work in a collaborative information management environment, you may often feel like your co-workers are not fully aware of all the different types of tasks you complete on a day-to-day basis. In order to obtain the best results as an organisation, leaders from different departments must be willing to share their knowledge and expertise so that everyone on the team can have a thorough understanding of each individual's major responsibilities. Here are five things about your role that you may want your co-workers to know.

1. Metadata is good for you

It can often feel quite tedious to enter metadata into various different information systems. As an Information manager, you need to show your co-workers the value of strong, standardised metadata and how it can benefit them down the line. Perhaps most importantly, you should stress that metadata is directly related to search capabilities. After all, by creating a metadata template that includes all of the fields that are most relevant to your organisation and ensuring that all of your co-workers enter information into these fields in a consistent manner; your entire team should be able to locate files quickly and easily through improved search functionality.

2. Information Managers know where information lives

When it comes to legal and eDiscovery requests, you should be one of your co-workers' most valuable resources. After all, you're the one who should be able to pinpoint the exact location of any information that is relevant to these requests in a quick, easy manner. In these types of scenarios, collaborative information management practices between Information Managers and other departments can make all the difference. By working with these other teams, you can be one step closer to removing the information silos that may exist within your organisation.

3. Technology implementations go more smoothly when records managers are involved

As an Information Manager, it's important for you to ensure that your organisation's IT team understands that you can be a valuable resource to them, especially when it comes time to introduce new technology implementations. Make sure that your IT counterparts understand that you have a broad knowledge of all of the information that exists within your organisation and any relevant compliance requirements. In fact, you should encourage this department to bring you in at the earliest possible point of an IT project. When records managers and IT departments work together, your organisation can smooth out the implementation process and work to avoid any situations in which surprise requirements are introduced.

4. Information Managers can help an organisation stay organised

You may sometimes feel pigeonholed into completing certain records-specific tasks, even though you can bring a much broader sense of expertise to the table. In an effort to improve efficiency throughout your organisation, you should make sure that other departments know that you can help out with a variety of different types of tasks, including those involved in procurement, mapping out business processes and managing the flow of information.

5. Information Managers play a crucial role in compliance

As compliance-related issues can cause your organisation financial and legal hardship down the line, it's important for you to make sure that your co-workers understand that you are there to help them meet all information-related compliance requirements. In order to protect your organisation from potential litigation, you must make it clear to other departments that you are up-to-date on the latest rules and regulations that apply to your industry. By making an effort to work closely with other departments, you can illustrate how your expertise can be leveraged across a variety of different information projects.