Best Practices for Storing or Validating Information

Storing Information: Best Practices

DI.12 lets you collect and store a lot of useful information so that you can share this with the people who need to know and be keep up to date on the latest developments in their business sector, concerning their customers, etc..

Some of the deliverables on DI work with stored or validated information only:

• reports
• newsletters
• Watchlists

There is also a strong link between how you can structure a deliverable and the structure of the project into which you have stored the information.

In addition, DI.12 allows you to run powerful analysis based on your stored information.  You can select the stored information you would like to include in an analysis based on the same criteria you use for including information in a deliverable.

Struturing a deliverable

In order to make information easier to understand, and therefore more accessible to the readers and as a result more likely to be used, it is a good idea to structure similar themed information in blocks or sections.  Let's imagine that I have been asked to send out a weekly newsletter to my sales and marketing teams.  I know that they are interested in product launches, marketing campaigns and business news about our key accounts.

The best way to send out this information would be to group the stories into three sections:

• Customer Focus
• New Products
• Marketing Watch

In order to do this, I will need to use three folders to store these three types of information.

Retrieving information

In addition to using folders as a basis for my deliverables, I can also use tags.  Tags will enable me to specify which kind of information I would like to pull out of each folder for inclusion in a deliverable.

Continuing the example from above, I may need to separate my basic newsletter into smaller more focused publications for different audience types.  Let's imagine that I have one or two key account managers who are only interested in their big accounts.  They may not have the time or the necessity to read about the smaller clients.  In this case, I can supplement the folder structure with tags.  If I tag information as I save it with the name of a big account, I will then be able to select information from my three folders only if it has also been tagged with a certain account.  And therefore create focused newsletters to satisfy a certain population of my readers.

Some of our clients have therefore created tags to identify and retrieve information based on:

• language used in the article
• names of big companies in their sector
• readership profile (top management, R&D, sales, etc.)

To find out more about structuring a project please read this post.