Missing valuable information is an unfortunate byproduct of today's massive corporate data stores. To make sure you can find information wherever it resides at a moment's notice, first understand if you're dealing with structured or unstructured data. Data from a company's logistics, finance or marketing activities can be pulled into a database that can then be fed to executives using a reporting system or dashboard. For a dashboard to work, though, a reporting system has to integrate data from separate systems, which must themselves be sophisticated enough to export it. The alternative is to move to a single platform with built-in reporting capabilities. And once you've moved to a unified platform, you have to persuade the employees to use the new system. But the biggest challenge of all is collecting tacit information that exists in people's heads. Depending on the size of the company, wikis, blogs and corporate social networking software could be a way forward.

To learn more about information access:
- read the article at Silicon