Discovering that yet another technology related verb has appeared in the language is nothing new. However the recent discovery of the verb ‘to google’ or ‘to googleit’ in common usage amongst non IT specialists coincides with a sea change in views on who owns information.

Traditionally organisations have pursued an information management strategy that has involved locking information away in carefully protected silo’s with limited access by members of staff and virtually no external access. Some of this information is carefully ‘revealed’ to the outside world as components of marketing and sales activity, regulatory reporting requirements, unplanned disclosure (a.k.a. a leak) etc.

In the commercial world the rationale for this is clear as companies seek to protect their intellectual property, strategy etc. Even here, however, there has been some migration towards opening windows in the walls that surround information, providing access for valued partners (often those in the supply chain) via intranets as well as broad, planned release onto websites. Intranets are also guardedly used to expose corporate knowledge to staff (though not without great resistance in many companies). The public sector, quite reasonably it seems, has followed the same information regime.

This is about to change. The Freedom of Information Act has forced a substantial realignment of how public sector organisations are expected to think about the information that resides inside their walls. Since the FOI allows anyone to request information on any subject (subject to a surprisingly small list of exemptions) public sector organisations have responded by pre-emptively publishing selected information to their websites and reactively providing further information on request. So far this seems to have been reasonably successful, eminently practical and not unduly burdensome to most.

Having just reviewed the FOI act again it could be that these organisations have completely missed the point.

Let’s think about it. The essence of the FOI is that information held by a public sector organisation (broadly excepting that which relates to specific individuals, is work in progress or is against the national interest to reveal) ispublic information. It should be in the public domain. Hiding it internally and then having to find it and manually publish it when someone asks for it is not exactly an efficient process. Doing this with information which is already held electronically is frankly ludicrous.

Why?

I’ll restate it, for emphasis: the presumption of the FOI is that information held by a public sector organisation ispublic information. These organisations, however, have yet to switch from the traditional way of working, where the presumption is that the information is private and confidential, until explicitly identified otherwise. The processes should be turned on their heads, with the information management cycle naturally resulting in documents etc. becoming publicly accessible, unless specifically tagged otherwise (individual patient information would, therefore, carry a marker that  prevents unauthorised access).

One might imagine all documents being pushed onto the organisation’s website; however this is also inefficient, for a raft of reasons including dangers of duplication, taxonomy and navigation management constraints, storage, bandwidth utilisation etc.

The Google phenomenon is pertinent to this conundrum. Traditionally we used a variety of mechanisms for finding information. These can be summarised as:

• Putting it somewhere I’ll remember (e.g. keep a copy in My Documents, store a link in the Favourites list)
• Mining for it, by drilling down through a navigation artefact such as a website menu tree or file system directory structure
• Asking someone who might know

Increasingly we rely on the latter, with search engines taking the place of people. I have observed myself searching for a new copy of information or an application online, even though I know I have already downloaded a copy to my PC. I do this because it is quicker to ask the search engine than to remember where I put it or to mine through my local data (though applications like Lookout or Desktop Google at last give me the ability to run the search locally). Organisations are introducing these powerful search tools into their infrastructure to allow staff to locate the information they need, often driven by the needs to locate information for managing FOI requests.

Herein lays a solution. Why not allow the public to use the same search tool, either permitting a public engine like Google to penetrate the firewalls etc. and see all the information which is not explicitly exempted, or else provide a public interface to the enterprise search engine implemented by the organisation itself.

Of course there are many challenges to securing the environment, ensuring that exempted info is well protected, providing adequate metadata and categorisation of content etc. But most of these are requirements of the document management approach in any case. The biggest, most difficult challenge is understanding whose information it actually is and adopting a culture and set of practices that reflect this. After all it (mostly) is not ‘your information’, it’s ours.