Spotting Value, Spotting Waste ◾ 45
Systemic Information 5S
As I mentioned, 5S applies to both physical and electronic
information, and so far I’ve been talking about using it for
personal information management. But applying it to the
information flows within an organization is perhaps an even
more powerful use of the tool. Think of the reports that you
either produce or read: How many of them show similar, or
even identical, information? How many of those reports do
you really need? I know of one IT department that produced
over 350 reports per month for the managers and executives
of the company. As part of a 5S initiative, they analyzed all
the reports, spoke to their customers (i.e., the managers and
executives), and managers and elim ...