How We Normalised the Collapse of Information Management

Most organisations today are drowning in information—and no one is steering the ship.

Across industries, companies are sitting on millions of documents. PDFs, spreadsheets, Word files, PowerPoint decks. Stored across email inboxes, desktops, file servers, SharePoint sites, cloud drives, intranets, and everything in between. Some of it is as old as the company itself. No one looks at it anymore, but no one’s brave enough to delete it either. The context is gone, the owners have moved on, and we’ve lost the ability to tell what’s important.

So what do we do? We keep it. And when we can’t trust what’s already there, we make more.

We don’t reuse. We recreate. We don’t maintain. We start again.

Every new hire adds more. Every project adds more. And every person is left to figure out, on their own, where and how to manage it all.

Strategy by Neglect

Most organisations don’t onboard people into an information management strategy—because most don’t have one. Instead, we rely on individual judgment. Want to store your files in email? Fine. SharePoint? Go for it. Local folder? Sure. Intranet? Also fine. How about Teams or OneDrive or the desktop? Why not.

We’ve convinced ourselves that self-management is a strategy. It’s not.

The Lone Fighter Problem

Every so often, someone tries to fix it. They see the chaos. They care. They try to bring in structure—standards, rules, tools. Maybe they even get a project funded. But most of the time, they’re left fighting alone. There’s no executive sponsorship. No cultural shift. And eventually, no progress.

The Real Cost

The impact is bigger than most realise. People lose hours chasing versions. Projects slow down. Decisions get made on bad information. And we duplicate the same work again and again.

Some estimates suggest up to 50% of knowledge worker time is wasted in the noise. That’s not a rounding error—it’s a systemic drag on productivity.

Information Is the Raw Material of Transformation

If your organisation is pursuing automation, AI, or digital transformation, here’s the truth:

Your tools are only as good as the information they touch.

Poor information management isn’t just a tech debt—it’s a strategic liability. You can’t automate a mess. You can’t scale chaos. And you can’t generate intelligence from systems that don’t know what they’re looking at.

What Comes Next

We call the new way forward Information Intelligence—a deliberate, structured, disciplined approach to managing and leveraging information as a strategic asset.

It’s not a quick fix. But it’s the only way out.

The mess won’t clean itself. And the future won’t wait for us to get ready.

Clean up your mess.