Information Asset Manager
Nowadays de CIO of a company is usually an IT person taking care of buying desktops, the contract for the network, some application development, etc. In short - the CIO is mainly in charge of the T of technology, and therefore in most IT policy the T is more important than the I of information.
My vision is that in the future this will be moving to become an Information Asset Manager. Gradually we are seeing the commoditisation of desktop support, networks, and even lots of applications (to me SAP R3 is also a commodity ...). Hopefully this will give us more room to focus on what really counts - out assets, our information assets.
Probably this will require a new generation of managers, since the current generation at the top (and below) has all been grown and rewarded in a technology culture. Therefore we should be hiring a different type of people today to become the managers of tomorrow. Else we will nog see a culture change (and therefore no step change in the way we manage information!)
Labels: culture change, Information Management
Six Sigma
If you talk to Japanese manufacturing companies (say Toyota or Toshiba) and you talk data quality, then soon you'll talk 'Six Sigma'. Six sigma is a term derived from the statistical term describing the standard deviation (sigma) and therefore describes the likelyhood to make an error. If you reach Six Sigma, you reach a quality where you hardly make any mistakes. This is particularly important in manufacturing.
When talking Six Sigma I think it is mostly striking to see that the quality process is everywhere; it is engrained in the organisation -from workers up to sr managers - quality is everywhere. And that is - I think - the main message of Six Sigma: You can only reach high levels of quality (and therefore also information quality) if this is engrained in everything we do.
Some vendors of data quality tools start to use the term Six Sigma in their toolkit and that makes me sceptical, since it is not the tool that does the job, but the complete culture change. So if you see managers buying a Six Sigma tool and not do anything else - than don't trust them!
Labels: culture change, quality
Integration is the Key
Things like data management and architecture are quite often still elusive subjects for senior managers. We produce pretty pictures, we make comments that are hard to disagree with, but when people ask us the 'so what' question we usually have a complex story about roles and responsibilities, compliance, implementation of difficult 4-dimensional data models and other intangible things. What we usually miss is the elevator speech that sells our story.
I have been reading through previous posts and I see a lot of things the fall in the first category I mentioned - the difficult & intangible overhead stuff. Therefore it is time now to focus on the one-liners ... I even think we can reduce it to a single word: The word
Integration. Probably the main reason why we do data management is because we want to integrate something:
- Integrate business process flows
- Integrate information from various processes into a single management view
- Integrate information over time - so we can compare today with yesterday
- Integrate the inside with the outside
- Integrate data with documents, maps, ...
OK - there's a few other things - risk management, compliance, etc. (pretty important stuff), but they key thing that people understand is the word integration. So probably in the future I am going to drop the word data management in discussions. When people ask why when I propose a certain measure, than I will say: Because you need to integrate ...
Labels: culture change, integration
Incremental Architecture
Implementing Enterprise Architecture is not an insignificant task and usually when carried out as a separate activity it has a high likelihood of failure. This due to its size and its lack of clear owners. Owners are usually more interested in more tangible pieces of functionality and less in the plumbing.
Luckily there is also another option and that's called
incremental architecture. It works as follows:
- Develop a high level of understanding of the direction for the portfolio / enterprise (so you cannot work without an overarching blueprint, but the ambition-level can vary
- Map the existing program to this high level picture - and you will see that projects overlap with elements that need to be developed to make the blueprint or vision a reality
- Expand the scope of the existing planned projects and include the common elements needed in the future architecture as deliverables to ...
This gives the opportunity to develop the integration gradually and has a higher likelihood for success, since it is part of the existing ongoing program. The only downside is that it is very hard to achieve a real step change ...
Labels: architecture, culture change, project management
Information Security considerations
Protecting information assets, i.e. information security is one of the key roles of an Information Manager. The drive to open up advocated in the last few items in this Blog does not undermine this role. Actually the strategy to open up helps protecting what needs protection, since it provides more focus.
Note that most information does not need protection. So what is really confidential? A short list is below:
- Anything related to people privacy (think medical, salaries, performance appraisals, ...)
- Anything related to money (think contracts, prices, budgets, tendering strategies, ...)
- Anything related to risks (think security arrangements or sr. executive travel plans, ...)
- And anything else that may harm the company (or people) when published and available on the street (think elements related to reputation, or think confidential strategies, etc.)
All the rest is NOT confidential! So if by default everything should be open (inside the network, which is obviously protected by a firewall, etc.) and only some areas should contain protected information.
What are the advantages:
- Implementing Search in a company is so much easier when the crawler only has to crawl the non-confidential records ...
- Collaborative working becomes easier, since by default you have access to the information stored elsewhere in the company.
- Don't forget about the reduced complexities of managing security in Windows and the overhead that comes with it. If things are easy, than it takes less time, but also there is more focus on managing what really needs protection.
But opening up requires a culture change. Most infrastructure people & IT managers have been raised in an environment of control, so therefore convincing them is a hard job.
There are also some technical considerations to take into account. E.g. when companies have an incremental back-up, than the back-up may fail if people are allowed to drag whole trees from one place to another, leading to GigaBytes of data to be added to the back-up ... Network security should prevent this (so some control is still needed!).
Labels: culture change, search, security, Web2.0
