Information Management Roadmap guidelines
You can notice Information Management (IM) space is quite hot these days. There are multiple tools coming into the market to put the power of knowledge in the hands of business users. These are also coming to the aid of IT Teams, in reducing their workloads, and enabling them to focus more on the data and information governance aspects. But quite often we lose track of the important principles that we need to follow. Albeit these are not quite difficult to follow, but are essential.
One can follow a particular sequence like:
1. The objectives have to be listed first, like: the business drivers, what should attract the attention of senior management, speed of availability, and done with lowest possible cost
2. Then we need to understand the important business and technology hurdles. Business hurdles are usually faced: standardisation of definitions, clarity on information / data ownerships, agreements on master data hierarchies, and achieve common understanding on business case. Technology hurdles are like: data standardisation, data cleansing, enterprise data model building, manage metadata, and other important items like scalability, reliability and availability
3. Since the IM programs are usually extensive, it is essential to give Business Centricity to establish quick wins, and continue the goodwill gained to further the program
4. Look at ways and means of reducing the effort wastage, through re-use of methodologies, frameworks and documentation templates
Finally, the IM is supposed to have and provide:
1. A pretty good base has to be built to serve as a foundation. This can be multi-layered data bases, data marts etc., but should have proper rules controlling the basic data management
2. To improve the standardisation, master data management (MDM) has to find a place in here. Business needs should dictate whether this should be a centralised MDM or decentralised MDM
3. Data privacy and information access is paramount, in addition to the information availability. Hence, access controls have to be properly set for the different business users, based on their span of control and information life cycle exposed to them
4. The last but one is the availability of play area(s) for business users. This could be either in the form of departmental data marts, just sand boxes, or some play pens. This area could be controlled in the form of persistent areas, aggregate areas, and non-persistent areas. This should also allow business users to bring in all their tools and expertise to explore data, fit the statistical modelling, and bring out information for informed decision making
5. To make all this work in tandem, and still provide freedom to the business users, we need better IM Governance.
Allow me to spend some more time on the important aspects that should be considered as part of IM Governance. First of all, IM Governance should be a body of some permanent folks, and some semi-permanent folks. The permanent folks are the ones who are more associated with the technology aspects and the data modelling aspects. The semi-permanent folks are the ones who are business users, who act as business analysts for the whole build. The semi-permanent folks are constantly replaced with a new set of people, depending on which business function is being addressed at any point of time. The permanent folks will also take care of the overall program budgeting, spend, re-usability aspects etc. They will also take care of the complete information lifecycle, its Governance and Stewardship. The Governance should handle Corporate Goals and Principles, define Roles and responsibilities, establish a working structure and along with it processes. The Information stewardship focuses mostly on the: Identifying vital / sensitive data, exposing metadata models for business users, define business rules on data manipulation and sharing, data rules on transformations, cleansing, creation of applicable metrics at different management hierarchies.
More on the IM Guidelines later....
Comments
Indeed a good view point on IM. I would slightly differ when it comes to IM Governance. I would insist folks closely associated with technology aspects play a semi-permanent role and business folks play a permanent role; i.e., just the other way around of what has been suggested by you. In my opinion, governance and ownership should always be with business - having said that, it should be driven by business themselves.
Posted by: Arun T | February 5, 2010 03:09 PM
I comprehend with KN's views and the articulation of the IM roadmap guidelines, nicely put together. Key factor on which success of this depends is the clearly defined objectives, and roles of the Governance group be it from IT or Business. Thats the reason why we say blessings from top for such a governance body is important both from communication point of view and the funding for sustaniability aspects. The group should have a right balance of IT and Business representation, however, the eventual ownership should rest with Business. Frameworks, standards, metadata, MDM, security definitions, communication channels are the means to achieve the objectives in a more methodological and structured mannner. One more factor which most organizations tend to ignore, is such initiatives focus more on structured content and the majority of information potential lying in the unstructured pile generated out of content management systems remains aloof. The roadmap should be able to bring in the holistic view of the Information Management to the front, plugging any gaps that remain.
Posted by: Yogesh Bhatt | February 8, 2010 08:57 AM
Hi Arunachalam,
Thanks for your valuable comments. Appreciate your efforts in going thru the blog. If you look at the entire SDLC Lifecycle of the application or BI development, the interaction comes with business only in beginning and end aspects (acceptance). But for a large BI Program, there has to be a single body to control the whole program w.r.t the project management, program management, data model governance, support & maintenance aspects. This is usually done by a BI CoE or BICC. BICC has more to do with program governance, data model governance, and project mgmt. The governance has to be done by a core team through out the life cycle of the Program. The governance body has to have more IT folks and less business folks. These business folks in BICC should be very top level folks and their involvement will be again part-time, if not temporary. The rest of the business folks have to participate in the governance just to make sure that their requirements are taken care of and they have voiced them clearly. I was talking about the regular business folks only, not the top business folks in governance. Hope this helps.
Posted by: Kopparapu Narasimha Rao | February 9, 2010 12:44 PM
Hi Yogesh,
Thanks for your efforts in going thru the blog. Appreciate your comments. Agree with you. This is just a blog, not a white paper. Besides, I am still going to continue on this in future. There is no doubt that the eventual ownership with rest with business.
You can look at the my blog on “Search: Information Access” for the other unstructured information access.
Posted by: Kopparapu Narasimha Rao | February 9, 2010 12:46 PM