Many organizations have a substantial potential for improvement when it comes to a culture, guidelines and tools for managing and reusing insight.
The lack of proper insight management can quickly grow to become the primary obstacle an organization faces in growing more quickly all the while improving and maintaining uniform quality.
Here are some of the most common problems organizations are experiencing due to a lack of proactive insight management.
Insight is distributed across several channels, making it more difficult to relocate it when needed. Rules of where to store and share which types of insight are unwritten at best and unclear at worst.
Even experienced coworkers can typically spend 2-3 hours each week looking for information.
These are some of the channels used for insight, sorted here by a deminishing degree of reusability and refindability:
Insight and other types of deliverables are organized by client/vendor/department/project in a folder structure. The folder structure within each top level is somewhat uniform. Navigating to find what one needs takes time.
When reusing insight, people often need to know for which project there was previously done similiar work in order to find relevant material to copy.
Employees are uncertain as to whether the expectations of what to find where in the folder stucture are aligned across their coworkers.
Insight is posted over various channels with names roughly matching the names of clients/projects/departments.
Insight is posted as answers to various questions from clients, coworkers, partners, investors, etc.
Insights is shared orally when someone has a problem or a question related to their work.
Insight is rarely constructed to be reusable, and when it is, there is often an assumption of a pre-existing level of understanding that is not given for someone who is new to the team.
The organization lacks the knowledge and a uniform vocabulary to properly store insight in a format which makes it easily searchable, reusable and possible to track how the insight was reused.
The understanding of terms like
...is not uniform across employees.
As a result, insight expexted to be reused often ends up in Word or Excel format which makes it more difficult to find and reuse, as well as ensuring that the insight is actually being reused and improved.
It's more difficult than it needs to be to gain a detailed understanding of how the organization and its teams is expected to do it's work.
This makes it more difficult to present the company to new team members and investors, ensure compliance and improve and automate processes.
Due to the lack of easily reusable insight, management or more experienced employees are often dependant upon to assist with more complicated deliveries. This keeps these resources tied up in a delivery-loop, making it difficult to free up time to focus on working on (as apposed to in) the organization.
No person or team in the company is measured (implicitly of explicitly) on to which extend they produce or consume reusable insight. As a result, there are fewer incentives to prioritize short-term work over long-term work.
Employees often feel like they have to choose between spending time making insight reusable or spend the time completing the tasks their performance is actually measured in relation to.