This first of a new series – Smart Thinking? – focuses on the challenges for finance teams raised by the Transparency Framework and information management
Welcome to ‘Smart thinking?’, a column about exploiting technology, finding better ways of working and encouraging innovation. The question mark indicates that it is about raising issues and inviting your feedback.
Take, for example, ‘improving information management’. Yes, it sounds boring and geeky, but bear with me. We are only just beginning to realise the full importance of information as a resource, an asset, a by-product and a collaborative tool.
Information is increasingly seen as one of the most important assets held by any organisation. Without it, customers cannot be served, plans cannot be made and decision-making becomes a lottery.
Significantly for public sector organisations, the coalition government sees much wider publication of information as essential to improving accountability and stewardship. Its Transparency Framework requires publication of information on performance and spending to allow the public to scrutinise and challenge figures and form their own views on whether they are getting value for money. The published data includes details of contracts, tenders, senior pay levels and individual items of spending.
But publishing this data once is relatively easy. The bigger challenge will be managing and maintaining consistency as ever more data is added. For example, will you be able to continue to demonstrate clearly the provenance, accuracy and integrity of all the information that you will publish?
Service users and employees expect fast, easy and self-service access to information. In addition, a generation that has grown up with the internet, video games and mobile phones is impatient of inefficient processes. For staff, an increasing number will need their desk to travel with them as they work on the move.
Improving information management is essential to reducing costs and optimising performance; improving services to customers and employees; planning and anticipating change; managing risk; and ensuring good governance and stewardship.
These are all important issues for finance teams and demonstrate why accountants now need to get more involved in improving information management within their organisations.
Over the past 30 years, managing information has effectively been ‘lumped in’ with managing technology. Most organisations talk in terms of information technology (IT) or information and communications technology (ICT) and develop corporate strategies for its deployment.
These strategies and the corporate thinking behind them are generally much more about the technology than the information. They focus on the plumbing, rather than the purpose of the plumbing, which is to share information. This is now changing and all organisations are having to rethink the relationship between information and technology, and focus afresh on information management.
Some might argue that accountants should limit themselves to dealing with financial data. This cannot be right as huge amounts of data are now generated daily and anybody can easily manipulate figures to produce impressive looking tables and graphics. Finance professionals need to ensure the integrity of data produced automatically and the robustness of information used by their organisations for planning and decision-making. Plus, they need to know that the information assets held by their organisations are appropriately protected and exploited.
So how well does your organisation manage the capture, storage, security and deployment of its information resources? Should accountants become more involved in information governance? The chances are that if you are having difficulties managing information now, it is about to get much more challenging.
John Thornton is an independent adviser and writer on business transformation, financial management and innovation and a member of the CIPFA IT Panel [email protected]
