Share Our Business Information With Who?

Business information has traditionally been kept hush-hush. Typically it is only trusted to upper management and the finance department. Sharing such information was once an unspeakable sin. Today, things are quite different in the workplace. With authority and decision making being redistributed across the organization, employees at all levels find themselves deeply involved in the day-today running of the business. This increased involvement creates a need for more information.

Teams need good information in order to function effectively. A key role of today's management is to make sure the team gets adequate business information in order to function effectively. Getting business information to the team that is timely, credible, relevant, and understandable presents a number of challenges. These challenges maybe internal to the team or external to the team. The benefits outweigh the challenges. Many organizations now have a practice of regularly sharing business information with all of their employees. Advantages include:

- Sharing business information will help employees to understand business fundamentals.

- Sharing business information helps employees see how their work contributes to the goals and objectives of the organization.

- Employees are better able to think beyond their job, department, or division.

The numbers can have a dramatic impact on the employees feeling of ownership.

These advantages help improve the teams' problem-solving and decision-making skills. Managing the information needs of the team is a critical function of the team leader..

Sharing business information with an entire team requires asking some difficult, self-reflective questions. Taking the time to answer those questions will create the proper environment for the team. Successful team leaders know how to make the information meaningful for their team. They give meaning to the numbers so the team can answer the question, "How does this affect us?" Team leaders must think very carefully about what they want to do and why. They should consult some of the many books, articles, seminars, that are available on the topic of sharing business information.

The team leader must decide precisely what should be shared with the team. Team involvement is critical at this point. Take the time to introduce the topic at a meeting and explain why it is important. Allow people the opportunity to ask questions or raise concerns. Next, ask the team members what kinds of business information they need. Be prepared for a lot of silence at this point. Since few team members may have had access to business information in the past, they may not know how to answer the right questions.

As a minimum, most teams need the type of business information that allows them to monitor and adjust how they are performing. These teams also need information on the goals of the larger organization so that they will be in sync with the company's strategies. Above all, the team must have information that will help it understand the business in order to make good day-to-day decisions. If receiving business information is new to the team, the team leader must start with basic information and slowly work up to a broader understanding of the numbers. This is an educational process and the intention must be to create a foundation of business literacy within the team.

Only when the foundation has been created, can the team leader help the team think about its ongoing business information needs. Quality, cost, delivery,safety, and employee morale, are examples of typical indicators. - What are the primary indicators of how the team's business is performing?

- What type of information will help the team track these indicators?

- What is the source of the information?

- How often should the team receive this information to be timely in its decisions?

- Who is responsible for obtaining this information?

It is simply not enough to bring business information to the team. The team leader must also understand the principles that underly the effective management of business information so that it feeds good team performance.

Planning about how to sustain the business information effort is just as important as implementation. Without continued attention to maintaining adequate business information on the day-to-day operations, the effort will simply fade away and become another "Flavor of the Month". It is crucial to design a business information system that will function independently of the team leader. This is especially important if the organization is not totally committed to sharing the business information or if there is a turnover in team leadership. In these instances, it is best to leave behind a sustainable system.

The road to sharing business information with the team has a number of ups and downs. The team leader must be persistent. It is essential to not allow the team to get discouraged by a few setbacks. Obtaining the type of information that creates energy and drives excellence take work. Remember, you must maintain a reasonable pace. It may require a little time for team members begin to trust the numbers, let alone use them!

Expect that you will face obstacles as you plan and implement the business information sharing strategy within the team. Some of the obstacles will be external to the team while others will come from within the team. The assumption in sharing business information is that authority is redistributed within the team. Rather than the organization sharing information on a need-to-know basis, it is treating employees more like partners. The team leader no longer holds information as a form of power, he/she is responsible for sharing the knowledge and training the team about the business.

Business Best Practice and the Power of Business Information

Do nothing and you get to stay as you are.

Best practice is the goal of each individual business and will probably be described as looking after matters of ethics and integrity, good customer relations, supporting staff and maintaining good standards of service, accountability and fiscal compliance. Or the description might include positive management styles, high productivity and good economic strategies.

Most would agree that best practice is leadership, goal setting, teamwork, maintaining a culture of compliance, supervision, discipline, support, training, accountability and responsibility.

What if all of these were the focus of a new way of managing business information that provided everything that was needed to manage the business for success and peace of mind?

What if your most precious asset is your business information and what if the success of your business is affected by a lack of order and control over what happens on your business computer network? When you have no control over your business information you have no control over best practice and you might as well forget about it being in control of the business.

Best practice is available through an intelligent network that uses Business Information Organization (BIO) to create the kind of framework that allows for everyone in the business to have access to what they need to achieve the outcomes the business needs. You won't have best outcomes unless you have best practice. You won't have best practice if your business information is in a mess.

This is not about the way that your computers and peripherals communicate and it is not about any software. It is not about having the newest and the best equipment. It is not about hiring smart consultants and contractors to take over what should be the role of the business. It is about the power of content and the context of that content.

To explain this approach to best practice there is the example of a new office goods company. They had purchased a new warehouse and were planning to sell their goods online and in a large new showroom at the business end of town. They hired a new business management consultant with links to software companies who advised that they have two ways of managing their stock. Option 1 was to leave everything on pallets and use barcodes to locate the right pallet to get the stock to fill an order. Option 2 was to unload the pallets and store all of the same items together. Both options would be supported by software and equipment.

They chose Option 1 because they could unload the trucks faster and by having a pallet friendly storage system, get a more even distribution of bulk throughout the warehouse. It went well for a short while but they suddenly found that they had to hire more people to work in the warehouse running around to different stacks to fill a single order of multiple stock of the same item and when the computer that managed the warehouse was hit with a virus, everything stopped.

You would be highly unlikely to have chosen Option 1 but the point is that business information is like stock and you may be unwittingly using that scatter option for your business information. The more information is scattered and the more the content is hidden, the less it is available for the business. If that business information includes policy, training, resources and business knowledge the business can be in dire straits or just not doing what it should be doing.

So what if the most important stock of the business was its information content and what if it was no longer hidden and available to achieve the best practice you so desperately want to achieve? Look at your information now. How much do you know about the way it is managed? Where is your policy? How accessible is it and who created it? How often is it reviewed and updated and who does that review?

Look at your own information. Do you organize it at all or is everything bundled in my documents, my pictures, my albums? Is everything haphazard or loosely organized because you tell yourself you are the only person who needs to know what is there and where it is? If you create new folders do you think hard about how they are named and sited? Are there times when you can't find anything? Is there time when you waste time and money looking for it?

The bad news is that the way that you don't organize your information is exactly the same way that you everyone on your staff can't and won't organize the information they collect or create and store as they work. And the even worse news is that they are quite sure that they are the only ones who should know where it is and what it is. And even worse than that, they think it belongs to them and will delete it without asking anyone whether the business wants to keep it. So how does Option 2 which is about sorting and control sound when it comes to business information and protecting what belongs to the business in a place where it can be seen?

If you were able to make policy, training, resources and business knowledge (current and past) available where and when it is needed, you will have what you need for leadership, goal setting, teamwork, a culture of compliance, supervision, discipline, support, training, accountability and responsibility. You will have best practice leading to productivity and business success. Can you claim that this is available to you now?

Don't let the IT industry keep dictating Option 1 for your business information content. They have a one-size-fits-all solution to your business information needs and they won't be in your business to see how chaos slows it down and sometimes brings it to a grinding halt.

Option 2 is about the Intelligent Network and Business Information Organization (BIO) and it will cost you nothing to set it up. It is time to find out how it works and why it will work in your business. If you do nothing more than creating a network place for information based on what the business is and what it does you will be on a winner.

Training and Retraining Senior Managers in Business Information Best Practice

There is an urgent need for business information management to be a crucial aspect of management training for executives in any kind of business or any size and in any location. This is a largely ignored aspect of management training with everyone leaving it to IT or information management professionals to deal with what the business needs, what it needs to spend and what it can expect. This will always result in outcomes being attached to output, in this case financial. But there is a fundamental component that is missing and it is time that it was noticed and replaced.

Messy, unstructured computer networks do nothing to support productivity and economic viability or encourage success for the average small, medium and large business. They are also a potential source of business degradation for large companies and government. Messy, unstructured information renders the business unsafe and unmanageable and messy unstructured information masked by document management systems and clever search functions are putting the business at risk, reducing its effectiveness and leaving it without the means to exploit the power of policy, training, resources and business knowledge.

Most business owners and managers are capable of setting out the rules by which their business information is managed but are unaware of both the need to do this and its relationship to their management role. They know they are capable of understanding the needs of the business but are not aware of the benefits of information structure and control. There are limits to their view of what is really available to them by controlling their precious but undervalued business information.

It is this lack of awareness that ensures that they are not in charge. Others are in charge. Those others do not have the interests of the business at heart because it is not their business but they have been given responsibility for all business information only because owners and managers have not been made aware of any other way to manage this precious asset.

Information management technology is usually viewed as simply a tool for creating, collecting, storing and using business information where the technology, having produced the information, is then used to try to create a context for the content. Systems currently used to manage business information will generally focus on creating context at the point at which the information becomes storable and not at the point in which it is determined as being usable. They do this by applying search terminology to enable the business to look back at what has been used. This application of terminology or key words is totally reliant on the person who is undertaking this work and it may or may not be in the best interests of the business.

Business Information Organization (BIO) is a methodology that maintains the context throughout the life cycle of all business information. That context is firmly seated within the operational profile of the business. This simply means that the information is structured to suit the business and not the operator. Any computer or network structure that moves away from 'my documents' and represents what the business is and what it is doing is using the power of BIO.

BIO as a methodology on an intelligent network does not rely on the artificial application of keywords and search terms to point to location of the information and return to it at some later date, but relies totally on the context of location of the information from the moment of generation or collection. On a BIO structured network nothing is generated or collected unless it is controlled by a business based location and this means it will be in context. This means that the location is predetermined and controlled by carefully organized folder structures.

The computer and the business computer network has evolved into a default setup that could never be recognized as the tool for location. Many individuals know to do this for themselves and they create order and control in where and how they store the business information for which they are responsible but most businesses are not aware of both the potential and the power of organization as a business-wide strategy.

Much of the current management training focuses on making use of existing systems and software. What if business executives were shown the basics of business information organization (BIO), the power of the intelligent network and how information best practice is one of the options for managing the business?

These are high stakes. The future of the business is being left in the hands of people who may be here today and gone tomorrow. Every business deserves to be told the truth about information management and what they should expect in the way of best practice. What might be the difference if a business could confidently say:

o We have complete confidence in content management on our computers and networks.

o All policy and compliance is in place where and when it is needed.

o Resources to aid productivity are logged and accessible in context of the work being done.

o Training is accessed continually in context of the work being done.

o Every new project is supported with policy, training and resources.

o Attachments are no longer necessary in in-house communications and duplicates are not tolerated.

o Less paper is produced and more information is digitized to maintain a strong knowledge base.

o Backups and security procedures are context based.

o The network is well managed with file naming protocols in place and folder management practices working across the whole organization.

o There are important economic benefits and greater productivity across the whole of the business.

Business Information - Find ANYTHING Today on Any Business!

There are times when you become too curious about someone or something that you start looking for any information that may answer your questions. Now, looking for the data of a business establishment should not be a stressful job at all since you could always look for information online hence this will free you from the trouble of going from one agency to another just for you to straighten the facts about something.

Actually, you won't exhaust yourself in looking for business information since they are considered as public records hence they are openly available without restrictions. That said, any person is given the chance to access copies of any form and they will not be required to provide authorization from the government. Generally, the record would embrace important information about someone that has been made known because of the transaction with the government.

For many government offices, they had been taking the initiative to make these public records to become available for a majority of people so the important details can be made known to anyone. Since 1990s, the government has been maintaining public record database and a good example of these records is the business information.

And due to the fact that public records are, well public then it can be expected that they are obtainable for free. For example, if you would like to get the business information that you need then all that you have to do is to visit the corresponding government agency and ask for the data. Nevertheless, expect that there are some offices that may ask you to shell out a very nominal fee for administrative reasons.

That said, there are some people who get shocked the moment when they start to visit online and request for the necessary business information only to find out that they are necessitated to pay for the public records. This may sound unfair at first but thinking that most of these sites were able to gather the information for free from various sources, it will definitely be unfair on their side to give all the facts that they know for free. After all, they've exhausted much effort to give people the benefits that they want. Also, given that these sites would maintain and always update their database, it is definitely acceptable if they would ask for some fee. Nevertheless, there is nothing to worry at all because the business information that one will get is surely worth the money because it is packed with all the facts that a person may need!

The Truth About Free Home Business Information

You will find free home business information useful if you have plans to start an Internet home based business. This kind of free investment business opportunity will be a lucrative offer for you enabling you to earn a good amount at your own pace.

There is no limitation to the benefits and the earning that you can derive from an Internet based home business.

In an online home business, the one advantage you have at your fingertips is that you have the entire world as the market where you can make your business popular and highlight everything about the products and services that you offer.

Internet business affiliated programs will make running a home online business even more easily for you.

The nuances to making the home business your source of income

From free home business information about building your own web business, you can learn about your interests and favourite topics that will be highly beneficial for your online business.

Your website will help you pick up internet traffic fast. After this, you can opt for a couple of related affiliated programs that will be excellent for popularizing your website and revenue earning.

You will be more interested in free home business information, when you realize that internet based home business can be a way to do what you enjoy doing and at the same time end up earning a decent amount of money from your Internet home business.

Another thing you will learn from free home business information is that you do not need too much of your money to invest from the start. But then you will also need to invest "your time"; if you spend your time building a good home business, you will already be earning a handsome amount of money before you know it.

Home business will give you flexible hours of working and the opportunity to be your own boss. An internet based business makes it convenient for you to build an International business and make your services gain recognition all over the world.

In case you have your family working with you, you will be able to have tax deductions on help from them. There will also be more deductions for travel, seminars, electricity bills, gas, phone, publications and more.

If you already have a job, then all the free home-based business information can also be a blessing for you, as you may have to give just 3 to 5 hours every week to your online business and get a full income.

Free Business Information Trials

As we all know, times are tough right now, and the ability to save money wherever possible is essential for businesses. A great resource to help build business is using the online databases available. However, you might not be too sure about them. Most of the online databases you will find online will offer you a free business information trial.

What is so great about these trials is that you are allowed unlimited access to the full database for a short period of time. If you don't want to sign up for a free business information trial right away, there are plenty of other resources to use to help aid in your search. These include:

- Google Search. Google is the ultimate search engine, making it relatively easy to find the information you are looking for...just make sure you use the right search terms.

- Going to specific company websites is another way to go about searching for information. However, not all companies provide information on all the employees that you would find in a database.

- Using a business database has all the advantages of having centralized information. However, they can end up being expensive.

A business database provides you with the best opportunity to extract your leads while gaining a competitive advantage and keeping up with the latest industry trends. However, due to all these opportunities provided to you, business databases can prove to be rather expensive.