Portable storage with enough capacity to hold the world’s largest library…. $99

A Dell PC® powerful enough to use that library’s data for competitive advantage… $499

An information professional who can make them both deliver information superiority for your organization… Priceless.

dollar sign

We frequently repeat the mantra that our people are an organization’s more valuable resource.  Court cases go on for years over intellectual property rights.  But, do we really demonstrate this valuation through our actions?

When is the last time that you invested in clearing the obstacles out of the path of your IT or knowledge management department?

Is your training, certification, and education budgets for this same group representative of their true value to your company?

Do you pay your information management team equitably to their  workmates in other departments?  Does your Chief Information Officer (CIO) receive a compensation package on par with your Chief Operating Officer, Strategic Management Officer (SMO), or Chief Financial Officer (CFO)?  Be honest…I bet that these others cannot even get to first base without that CIO these days.

Here are some resources from around the web for you:

Most importantly, do you have an Information Professional recruitment, retention, and reward program of such a caliber that you have confidence that your organization is the one attracting the best in the business?  Are you losing this priceless competitive ingredient to the same companies that are taking your market share, too?

Personally, I believe that in today’s Information Age economy, market success in nearly every segment is a factor of the talent of your knowledge workers times their available time per day to apply their strengths to your bottom line output.  I think that Information Professionals bring a unique skill set to the fight that has the ability to make good organizations great.  If you sense that your organization is working twice as hard as your competition, but still producing less at greater cost, I can almost guarantee it is because your glue – the information management team – are second string players.

It is time for us all to go back and see if we are treating our Information Professionals like they are Priceless or more like that $99 hard drive.

So do you think that people are the most important ingredient in a successful knowledge / service based economy or is there something else?

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for April  4, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin .