The Best Practice Of Information Management At Home Depot

Register to read the introduction… The next best practice is information management. The author believes that technology is not the answer but an enabler for companies to manage their information as an asset. The main purpose of managing information as an asset is to benefit the customer. "There has to be a sustained commitment to change attitudes and behavior if technology is going to help in leveraging information assets for the benefit of the customer." (Unruh, 1997) The article also mentions some technology enablers such as personal computers, software applications, networks, workstations and servers. These items give employees the opportunity to share information that crosses their own areas of expertise and access this managed information whenever there is a need. The next best practice comes under knowledge management and targets managing effective knowledge transfer. The article covers the main areas that influence a company's ability to transfer knowledge. This process has a qualitative assessment approach that "is framed as organizational characteristics and managerial practices required to establish an effective knowledge transfer process…" (Goh, 2002) The article mentions about a reward system that uses a more balanced scorecard that considers collaboration and sharing their best practices to encourage employees to transfer knowledge between groups or individuals and develop new processes that will continue to improve communication within the company. The next article deals with integrated IT infrastructures and the company's ability to "unbundle information flows from physical flows, and to share information with their supply chain partners to create information-based approaches for superior demand planning…" (Rai, Patnayakuni & Seth, 2006) This allows companies to manage the staging and movement of their product, streamline large and complex amounts of processes and continually improve overall company performance. This best practice method incorporates supply chain and IT infrastructure with operational excellence and customer relationships. By merging these areas into one process and implementing a digitally enabled supply chain process, companies can communicate processes and procedural changes throughout their organizations for improving existing processes. The next method evaluated for managing information as an asset uses the information lifecycle management (ILM) as part of an "overall system, asset, application, security and data management [tool]." (Geronaitis, 2005) The process design simplifies the information management process from its beginning to its storage. This process moves data in specific segments that are determined from the company's present business value. This process has several steps that the author recommends should be accomplished in stages. The main focus of this process is to align infrastructure with business value using automated migration tools so companies do not compromise their business information when upgrading systems and applications. The final best practice for managing information as an asset comes from an article that covers protecting knowledge and trade secrets in collaborative research and development relationships with other companies. The article mentions the fact that moving information from one company to another, whether by electronic submission, courier or hand delivery still leads to the possibility of information …show more content…
Home Depot is always searching out ways to improve products and services to their customers since the company has realized the need for redirection and process improvements. Of the listed best practices for managing quality, speed and flexibility I believe the ones that will best serve this company would be collaboration of a new optimization and management service and a systems thinking managerial process. Using both of these will allow Home Depot to provide better service its customers and move forward into a more technologically advanced process than they are presently …show more content…
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Geronaitis, J., (2005). ILM – Controlling the data mountain. ITNow, 47(5), 6.