Step 2 Identify factors involved in creating a positive environment for using the Internet within your organization.
This section gives you tools to discuss the mission and function of your organization and examine how information is used. Taking a look at how your organization uses information to achieve its goals can help you understand the relevance of different types of information to your organization and the processes involved in getting and giving them. It can also help you plan how the Internet can improve these processes. Information is an important aspect of any type of work. The farmer needs to know the current prices and availability of specific crops to decide what to cultivate and send to market. The chief executive officer of a corporation must keep informed about competitors' activities, new ways to manufacture and market products, how much customers are paying, and what is and is not selling. The university professor must stay in touch with colleagues and understand what research is taking place in his or her field. And, as you will read, HEALTHLINK 2000 needs to keep abreast of scientific and political developments, new funding opportunities, and initiatives by partner organizations. All of this information and more can be transmitted via the Internet. Overview: Conducting an Assessment of Your Organization's Use of Information In conducting this information-oriented assessment, you will complete a series of exercises. The exercises serve as a starting point to help you define your organization's purpose or mission, analyze its information use, and provide some important input in developing an Internet action plan. The information use analysis here in Step 2 will show clearly the relationship between the purpose of your organization or business, the type of information you use, and why you use it. Later you will determine which Internet applications can best meet these needs. Here is what you will do in these exercises: 1. Define succinctly (20 to 30 words) your organization's purpose or mission. (If your organization already has such a statement, use it rather than create a new one.) You will link how your organization uses information to its purpose. 2. Identify how and with whom you share information to accomplish your organization's purpose. 3. Identify what information you share with your target audiences and why you share it. Worksheets for creating your own information use analysis are located in the appendices. You—ideally in collaboration with others in your organization—need to think through the questions on the worksheets, using HEALTHLINK 2000 as a guide. Whether you develop the first draft of these worksheets by yourself or with others, remember to make sure that everyone in the organization, at all levels, agrees with your responses.
What Is the Purpose of Your Organization? The way your organization or business uses information is naturally tied to what your organization does. Some companies have already developed what are called mission statements, vision statements, or statements of purpose. What does your organization do? What are its objectives? See the box on the next page for other organizations' statements and the completed worksheet on the following page for HEALTHLINK 2000's statement. As with all the exercises in this manual, a worksheet filled out for HEALTHLINK 2000 is included in the main text, and a blank worksheet for you to photocopy and fill out is located in the appendices. Exercise 1: Describing Your Organization's Statement of Purpose Write one sentence (20 to 30 words maximum) describing the purpose of your company or organization on the Organization's Statement of Purpose worksheet. A blank worksheets is found in appendix 3, Organization's Statement of Purpose.
(For a blank copy of this
worksheet, see
With Whom Do You Share Information? Whether you are looking for ideas on how to improve your program or whether you are sending funding proposals to potential donors, every organization has specific places and people, or certain types of places and people, with whom they regularly share information. To develop a comprehensive information use analysis, it is helpful to think consciously about the organizations and people with whom you share information. These are the important questions to answer:
Exercise 2: Sharing Information Fill out the following Information Sharing worksheets—Giving Information and Receiving Information—for your organization. It is important to include the general type of organization with whom you share information (e.g., libraries or public agencies). If you have time, also list the specific places that fall into those categories (e.g., under "libraries," you might list the names of the libraries you regularly access, or under "other organizations," you might list specific groups or coalitions with whom you work regularly). The next two pages show how the HEALTHLINK 2000 staff used the worksheets to determine how they give and get information. Blank worksheets are found in appendix 4, Information Sharing: Giving Information and appendix 5, Information Sharing: Receiving Information.
(For a blank copy of this worksheet, see appendix 4, Information Sharing: Giving Information Worksheet.)
(For a blank copy of this worksheet, see appendix 5, Information Sharing: Receiving Information Worksheet.)
What Information Do You Give and Receive—and Why? To complete this information use analysis, you need to look at two other important factors:1) why you give information to a specific organization or person, and 2) what information you give them. HEALTHLINK 2000 considers its target population and its funding sources to be the two most important groups to which it gives information. The two most valuable places from which it receives information are experts in the field and libraries. In the following Information Use Analysis, HEALTHLINK 2000 analyzed its information giving to its target population and its information retrieval from experts in the health education field. Ideally, HEALTHLINK 2000 should fill out similar sheets for the other primary audiences that it identified on the two Information Sharing worksheets. There are clearly more factors involved in using information than simply who, what, and why—everything enters into the total picture, from how you give or receive information (over the telephone? in publications? by searching databases?) to when you give or receive information (every day? once a year?). But the who, what, and why are the basic questions that must be answered to determine appropriate directions for using the Internet. The Internet itself will be one way that you change the "how" in exchanging information. Exercise 3: Information Use Analysis Fill out the Information Use Analysis worksheets for each of your organization's major targets and sources of information to get as complete an analysis as possible. Another way to look at the question "Why is the information needed?" is to think of what the information will be used for. What is the end result that the information will help you accomplish?
(For a blank copy of this worksheet, see appendix 6, Information Use Analysis (giving information) Worksheet.)
(For a blank copy of this worksheet, see appendix 7, Information Use Analysis (receiving information) Worksheet.)
Are You Ready for the Next Step? If you have worked your way through the exercises in Step 2, you will have completed an information use analysis. These exercises should have started you thinking about the information you share and who you share it with, both as a giver and as a receiver. In Step 3 you will consider the technical aspects necessary for your organization to connect to the Internet. Understanding the extent of your information needs will help you recommend the purchase of an appropriate level of Internet service and equipment—not too much so that you spend more money than you need to, but enough so that you are not taxing your organization's computer and electrical systems. |
