What Its About
The Shared Information Manager (SIM) has been created to assist the members of the DIF DTC keep up to date with the people and projects within the organisation.
The DTC has a large number of projects running in Universities and Commercial Research Departments across the south of the UK. All projects are grouped into one of the five academic themes running through the DTC. Some projects are grouped together into Clusters with a common technical goal, some have not yet matured enough to be incorporated into a cluster. Some people work in a variety of roles within the DTC, some work on more than one project. The people working within the DTC change over time, even those who stay with the DTC change roles, email address and phone numbers. In essence the DTC endeavour represents a complex web of relationships that its hard to understand or to keep up to date without some help.
Information management is at the heart of the SIM. Members are able to keep the information they know the best up to date, for example your contact details and how you like to be addressed are best know by you. The SIM is designed so that your update will be immediately available for others to make use of. Project Managers know the aims and objectives of their projects better than anyone, therefore they will be responsible for keeping that piece of information up to date. In short ownership of information will be the responsibility of the most appropriate person, this should not be onerous as the most appropriate person will know all about it! Complex relationships such as membership of forums will be centrally managed on your behalf, so that you will be able to contact members of, for example, the Programme Management Office without having to know who is in it. Other relationships are managed automatically, for example a new member of a project will automatically become linked to the appropriate theme.
We aim to make simple processes available to you. For example basic e-mail facilities will be available without having to use your own mail software, when you use this facility you will get a copy of your message sent to your own e-mail address with a pre-formatted title so that you can make use of rules on your own system to keep track of conversations initiated from the SIM. Permissions to publish is another process that will benefit from being semi-automated. Using the SIM allows you to make the request by filling in the forms and being able to track the progress of the application on-line.
We will roll out the SIM in incremental steps. Your feedback will help influence which step is incremented next. Without your involvement, which we aim to make minimal, the information contained within the SIM will become stale and its ability to help will dwindle.
Any comments or suggestions for improvements are most welcome. Please direct them to Chris Beaumont