Information specialists are tool makers. They can tell us what tool to use to hammer upholstery nails into a chair. We need to decide whether we should be upholstering a chair at all.
A requirement of an information-based organization is that everyone take information responsibility. The bassoonist in the orchestra takes information responsibility every time he plays a note. Doctors and paramedics work with an elaborate system of reports and an information center, the nurses’ station on the patient’s floor. The district officer in India acted on this responsibility every time he filed a report. The key to such a system is that everyone asks: “Who in this organization depends on me for what information? And on whom, in turn, do I depend?” Each person’s list will always include superiors and subordinates. But the most important names on it will be those of colleagues, people with whom one’s primary relationship is coordination. The relationship of the internist, the surgeon, and the anesthesiologist is one example. But the relationship of a biochemist, a pharmacologist, the medical director in charge of clinical testing, and a marketing specialist in a pharmaceutical company is no different. It, too, requires each party to take the fullest information responsibility.
ACTION POINT: Take information responsibility by getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Make a list of whom you depend on for what information and, in turn, who depends on you.
The Ecological Vision
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker