It's not sexy

Got it - Information Management is not sexy. But do people even know what it even is? Public Servants should -- it's one of our core competencies after all.  I have some ideas on how to sex it up, but my management feels IM is serious business and simplifying the message will make it sound less complex then it really is. Well guess what, it's not complex AT ALL
.

First thing you do to practice good IM is PLAN for your information needs. You sit down with your team and ask questions -- what type of information do we need to collect for this project? who needs access to it? where are we going to store it? are we going to name our files a particular way?, are we going to be collecting or creating sensitive (private) info? are we going to minute our meetings or just the actions?, etc.
 

Then you DO -- You document your activities and your decisions following all the great rules you agreed to with your team. And at the end the project you look at all your information and toss the crap and keep the good stuff, which is anything that serves as the best evidence of what transpired -- the key decisions points, proof of where you spent $ and final deliverables that will inform future work.
 

And that's pretty much it. There's a bit more that we IM Specialists do behind the scenes plus public servants need to know a few more things such as -- if you have to hand over info because of an ATIP request then hand it over, don't delete it ... DUH! These are common sense and I'd rather not belittle people's intelligence, but we have to inform them or else they will plead ignorance ... which isn't much of an excuse, but we have to CYA.

So my ideas to make this as painless as possible ... I will save for another post. As I re-read what I just wrote, I'm thinking "FAUUUUK ... I must be missing something here ... is this all there is to IM FFS?"