The first question - how do you know whether your organisation values information?
The simplest is to watch the work that managers do and how they do it (to note - I’ve made a binary distinction below - value vs. don’t value, it’s more nuanced than that, the distinction keeps it simple).
Organisations that value information constantly create information for reuse and reference later. They measure performance using information. When they need to know something about the state of what they’re managing, they go to the information they’ve created that tells them about that. Their coordination mechanisms are informational. They tend to assess performance using information about the same things over time. When they intervene, it’s generally because information triggered them to.
Organisations that don’t value information have a tendency to make everything about what people know and conversation. To them, information they create has a very short term value, then it’s essentially waste. When they need information, they find out who knows about what they need, and they talk to them. They don’t create information for reuse later, they create it for now, then they use it. When they need to know about that same thing again, they have the conversation again. Performance, coordination and intervention are all knowledge and conversation factors.
It’s impossible to convince an organisation that doesn’t value information that there’s value in managing it. It’s an investment in the past, and even if the information is useful, their management reflexes and problem solving habits are all about talking to someone and creating information based on the conversation, they just won’t think about it.
The only way to get them to value information management, is to first get them to value information. The process to do that is time consuming, but not difficult, it’s much more about persistence than anything else. I’ve found that the best route isn’t pitching information management, or talking about how valuable information is - everyone has an intellectual understanding of those things. What they don’t generally have is a connection between things they care about, and how creating an information asset can make those problems more easily solvable in the future.
The best route to getting there is to just ask questions. The best questions are about why something that should have been ten minutes reading a document took 3 meetings with 5 people each, or about why forward motion is so hard on problems when working between teams who define the same thing in two different ways, neither of which has been documented (so again, it’s 3 meetings with 5 people each).
It’s here though, that we bump into an irony, a curious problem for information and records management. We are a discipline for which no further explanation of how valuable forward looking information assets are, and how to create them. We know (often viscerally) how difficult, expensive and frustrating it is to manage paper files without the core information asset of a catalogue (generally an EDRMS), and how badly things go when catalogues are badly maintained. We also operate lots of our work around reports driven out of the catalog data - information we create to coordinate our work.
Despite that, our entire professional rhetoric is evidential and transactional. Information is created or received, then it must be stored in a transactional aggregation so that we have evidence of the transaction. We don’t really have a professional rhetoric about the value of information as an asset created specifically for its value in the future. It’s an unnuanced view of evidence, and it gets in the way of these conversations because when we think transactionally, we’re not thinking at the level managers need to - which is as someone supervising many transactions, and needing information which is either a summary, or a point in time view of a specific thing maintained for its informational value, rather than its past-focused evidential value.
It’s a strange irony, because we live something different every day - but it’s there, and it’s between us and solving this key problem, and we have to solve it, because our management practices just aren’t valuable while the thing we’re managing isn’t seen as valuable.
I always look for analogies, and there are lots of good ones. Spent yeast from brewing, whey from cheese making, Molasses from sugar refining - there was a point in time at which you would have been branded mad if you told someone you wanted to spend money managing these things. Now the yeast is in Vegemite (and Marmite), Whey protein is a huge industry, and Molasses goes into fertiliser, animal feed and plastic. It’s a pretty good analogy - the focus for these was ‘right now’ - no one was thinking about the value of reusing them, they were waste, and spending anything other than the smallest amount of money possible on waste is stupid.
Now though, brewers, cheese makers and sugar refineries value those things. They aren’t focused on cheapest cost to dispose of, they’re focused on quality management and control, and securing long term relationships with buyers. In short, now that waste is something they will invest in - because the quality of it matters to their results.
It wasn’t until they valued it though, that they would spend money to manage it.
In much the same way, until we teach our organisations to value information, they’re just not going to spend time and money managing it, and we won’t be able to convince them that our practices and work is valuable.