Building Rivers of Information Increasing Your Individual, Company, and Career IQ through Self Education ● Overview of Rivers of Information ● Step-by-step Process for Building your River of Information ● Tool-Based Checklist for Developing your River of Information Overview We’ve never been able to gather as much information and get it into our brains as quickly as we can right now. The internet provides an awesome quantity of information, observations, and opinions on a daily basis. The Rivers of Information process is essentially streamlining information into one’s accumulation of knowledge. This can be through any informational source, and those sources are increasingly found online. Social technologies are a huge collection of important tools that are providing greater access to information all of the time. You can choose to become more informed by taking it upon yourself to study information everyday. Now, multiply this info-gathering method times all the people in your workforce. Developing an ability to digest and redistribute valuable pieces from this massive flow creates an advantage in the traditional marketplace. Think about the collective intelligence building it could add to your organization and the distinct advantage it could bring on the competition. This process costs virtually nothing beyond the time invested in consuming the content, yet very few people make the effort to refine it into an effective art. More than that, most organizations do nothing to provide employees with help in either identifying valuable sources of information or the tools that can be used to aggregate and filter it. In this document we’ve provided six steps to follow that will help you institutionalize the process of building Rivers of Information into your organization. We’ve also provided a tool-based checklist of details that will help you (and your staff) develop high-quality rivers. In a knowledge economy, the smartest teams win. Somewhere along the line, many people skip the step it takes to build their unique system for finding valuable information sources and filtering this information into their brains. This is about making the most of the time you have to improve. All it takes is 30 to 45 minutes everyday. Just think, if you spend 30 minutes a day, that is 210 minutes of information gathering a week, 840 minutes in a month, and 10,920 minutes in a year. That equals 182 hours of active learning that you’ve added into your year. How much can you learn in 182 hours? If that information is targeted, you can learn a lot on any topic that you decide you want to become knowledgeable about. Multiply that amount by the size of your staff – that equates to a mountain of information that your organization can be pulling in at all times. If you aren’t currently doing this (or your employees aren’t), what else are you doing with that time? Goals 1. Identify the most useful sources of information in your industry for the areas your people specialize in – It would be staggering to have the ability to measure the sheer volume of useful information created each and every day on the web. Likely, we only become aware of a tiny fraction of this information on a daily basis. The difference between what we actually capture and the amount that is freely available is vast, and even closing that gap by a small percentage could reap huge rewards. That is the first goal of this process. If you now see only 5% of the information created with your industry, we want to move that needle to at least 20%. At the same time, we want to assure the quality of this information is high. Volume of consumption is not useful if the information is not useful to some degree. 2. Implement technology tools that will aid in finding, aggregating, consuming, and storing information – Almost every day, a company or creative programmer develops a new web-based tool to aid in the consumption, storage, or ability to distribute information. As with many skill sets, the right tools make all the difference. However, most people invest very little energy into using the best tools to raise their career IQ. The goal here is to correct this situation by assembling a package of tools for yourself and team members as well as providing the direction required to use them. 3. Develop processes for harnessing the information in the most efficient and timely manner – Once information-gathering tools are in place, your team needs to know how to use them in the most efficient manner for their unique styles of learning. In addition, most will have very different schedules. There is no right or wrong answer in deciding the most effective method for any one person. The critical goal is to help people flexibly configure the process that works best for them 4. Replicate this process across the organization so constant learning is a team strength – This process must be embedded across the corporate culture for it to be sustainable. For this reason, the goal of developing practices that inspire and help team members gain the value is critical. It is common to work hard at driving concepts like safety, ethics, and innovation into organizational culture, but now you need to add the pursuit of continuous individual learning. 5. Outlearn your competition on a daily basis with access to real time information – A clear goal is to be better educated than your competition on what is happening in your marketplace. Knowledge is power, and with the growing ability to gain information in real time there is no excuse for not being better informed than your industry competitors. At times, value is derived not just from access to volumes of information, but from the speed at which you receive it. Process Step One – Identify a robust list of valuable information sources – Regardless of the industry you operate in, there are hundreds of sources of information that can be valuable. These include sources such as industry newsletters, bloggers, Twitterers, research firms, news aggregation services, and discussion groups. In most cases, access to this information is free and takes only moments to subscribe to. Everyone has at least a few of these sources already in their river, so the task here is to identify the top 20 quality sources you do not currently have and add them. Create a larger river than you have today and start testing the value of each new source. Only through actively and continuously working to improve your river will you grow your career IQ at a high rate. Here are some additional thoughts to consider when gathering key sources of information: ➢ The fastest way to find new sources is to gather the tools already used by others in the organization. Though many others will have accrued their own valuable sources of information, these resources are often not shared with others. ➢ There is a tension between quantity and quality here, so be sure to recognize this balance. If you continue adding to the quantity without siphoning through to the most valuable sources, you will overwhelm your capability to digest what you have access to, thus defeating the purpose. The goal is to find the highest quality 20 sources of information. This means whenever you add a new source, you should unsubscribe from a relative subpar source. ➢ Try to create a good mix of information types – opinions, news aggregation, competitive analysis, statistics, and alerts. Also mix information channels, blogs, Twitter feeds, newsletters, etc. Don’t get overly extended in one area or the result will be a hole in your information flow. ➢ Be sure to document this list where everyone can share it, and provide a method for people to add to the list as they find new viable sources of information that should be followed. Step Two – Implement technology tools to help you consume the information – The best defense to combat overwhelming information flow is the application of software tools. Tools such as NetVibes are designed to aggregate many different sources of information onto one screen. There are listening/alert tools that will continuously hunt down any mention of a keyword and bring the information to you. Storage tools like OneNote, Evernote, and Pocket help you clip and store important pieces of data. When these tools are used in conjunction, you can improve the quality of information you obtain from relatively minimal time invested in reading. You can also save time searching for information by hand and disseminating information back out. Do not attempt to build a larger river without first installing the technology infrastructure to manage it. On a side note, most of these tools are free so there is little to no cost barrier concern. Additional thoughts to consider: ➢ Although personal preferences can be allowed, the more an organization can standardize a tool set for this process, the easier it will be to train and bring new employees up to speed. ➢ When thinking about how to orchestrate technologies to help with rivers of information, consider routing different types of information to various devices. For example, send all video blogs to your mobile device so you always have something valuable to do no matter where you are. Send critical sources of information to your email so you are sure to see them every day. Organize information delivery in a way that is most beneficial to each person involved. This will maximize efficiencies in digesting the information. Once all necessary tools are in place, it is important to teach the team the art of unsubscribing from sources that have stagnated. Those who forget to do this end up wasting time sorting through too much clutter.