Reserve Bank of New Zealand 221Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without writtenetc.) along with experience from external and internal organizations. This was then used
to identify where the exposures may be in terms of risks or barriers.
The three categories were also analysed in terms of their collection, storage, access,
sharing, and use as shown in Figure 3.
This outcome of this process indicated that, as expected, the Bank was reasonably
good at managing the structured information (data) in terms of sharing it and providing
access to it. With unstructured or semistructured information, the Bank considered it
was good at its collection, but not so good at organising and storing it. For example,
although a document management system was in place, it did not integrate well with the
e-mail system and so e-mails tended to be held personally. The same thing was found with
experience — while the Bank considered it was good at recruiting both graduates and
globally experienced staff, its view of their experience then tended to become limited to
their specific role rather than their entire experience, which was often far wider. The Bank
also found that sharing of information within departments was far better than the sharing
between departments.
Armed with this knowledge, the Bank then carried out phase three of the program,
which included a gap analysis that would be used to formulate the strategy. The gap
analysis identified four threads:
- People to Information. This category consisted of infrastructure-type activities
aimed at improving knowledge repositories as well as making them easier to access.
This ensured that individuals had timely, secure, and accurate data and information
to be able to carry out their work. These infrastructure-type activities operated at
two levels: management of information coming into the organization, and handling
the dissemination of captured information. To carry out the activities required an
understanding of what information was needed, or at least, anticipation of the
broader requirements. To achieve this, staff in the Bank’s information centre
worked closely with the different departments to ensure that they knew all that was
available within the organisation.
Figure 3. Categorisation of information (adapted from Anand, 2003)
Note: Sharing within departments is much stronger than sharing between
(^) Poor Excellent
Collect
Capture
Organise
Store
Access Share Use
Structured (data)
Un/semi-structured
(email, docs, reports)
Experience (knowledge in
people’s heads)