Information Management

The following AFAIRS principles guide information management activities:

Information and data is an ASSET, which should:	be proactively managed throughout its lifecycle due to its inherent strategic value be utilised in a legal and ethical manner have clearly defined stewards assigned to manage it throughout its lifecycle follow the principle of born-digital: stay digital
To be FINDABLE, information and data should be:	registered or indexed in a searchable resource described with rich metadata and contain basic machine actionable metadata assigned a unique identifier, where possible, so that it is findable at any point in time
To be ACCESSIBLE, information and data may be obtainable by machines and humans:	upon appropriate authorisation through a well-defined protocol
To be INTEROPERABLE, data should be structured and:	be machine-actionable utilise shared vocabularies and/or ontologies be both constructed in a way understood by machines and from which meaning is then able to be derived
To be REUSABLE, information and data should be:	well described so that it can be easily linked or integrated with other data sources of quality, with its source and context well understood
To be SECURE, information and data should be:	classified appropriately labelled appropriately managed appropriately

Applying the Information Management Principles

• the Principles are inter-related and ideally need to be applied as a set

• the Principles will sometimes compete. For example, the principles of "accessibility" and "security" often conflict

• each principle is meant to be considered in the context of "all other things being equal"

• at times a decision will be required as to which principle will take precedence on a particular issue

Benefits

The Framework aims to deliver or enable the following information management benefits:

Increased impact of work outputs	Managing the outputs from our work to increase its impact.
Improved discovery and access	Providing easy and transparent access to accurate and timely data and information.
Improved integration and accuracy	Collecting data once and ensuring its integrity and quality.
Improved decision-making	Understanding the business and providing better information to support analysis, decision-making, and risk identification.
Improved compliance and decreased costs	Through efficient processes and systems, achieving record-keeping and regulatory compliance and reducing costs.

Types of information

Formal Content

GOAL: Increase our spread of formal content across the business but not its depth of penetration, reserving it for that content that needs that structure and control.

Well defined and controlled in both its structure and composition and has a recognised and active set of owners and stakeholders.

It should include regular review cycles and a known place where it is published and consumed from.

EXAMPLES: Defined reports, compliance pieces, RFPs, and contracts.

Group Content

GOAL: Significantly increase both the spread and depth of group content across the business with the aim of better managing knowledge, improving team efficiency and better demonstrating process compliance and maturity.

Owned and governed by a development team. While requiring some control and structure primarily to encourage consistency, searchability and reusability, the overhead of Formal Content is unwarranted.

EXAMPLES: Team templates, regular internal reporting, meeting agendas and minutes and internal documentation templates.

Individual Content

GOAL: Provide team members with the ability to quickly develop and maintain knowledge for their own purposes / day-to-day duties

Largely unstructured and ungoverned content produced by individual team members as part of performing their day-to-day duties.

Represents the individual body of knowledge that (hopefully) has been documented by team members or is the product of their work activities.

It could be turned into group content with little effort (i.e. introducing a collective rather than individual ownership, standardising the format and storing appropriately).

EXAMPLES: personal notes used during brainstorming