Top Challenges Information Managers Must Master In 2008

"Top Challenges Information Managers Must Master In 2008" as seen by the Editorial Staff at DM Review:

Moving content management throughout the enterprise. If you concentrate on some facet of enterprise content management (ECM), you know the challenge of getting business people to actually use the content system instead of relying on the old way of doing things. And now it’s getting more complicated as business people’s expectations continue to change through their use of new technologies that can store content in the cloud.

Evolving collaboration strategies to reflect the way people work. If you focus on collaboration, there’s not only the constant issue of Microsoft versus IBM, but now the ante has been raised with questions like “Should I bring Google into the picture?” or “Should we use wikis instead of document management?” coming from all corners within the
enterprise.

Dealing with a changing data management landscape. If you concentrate on data management and decision support, then recent consolidation in the BI market created more work for you. Plus, data governance issues continue to grow, driven by increasing interest in data warehousing appliances, metadata management, and master data management.

Insights about SOA

From "Why REST, WS-* and technology are the problem, not the solution" by Steve Jones:

"...I'm really beginning to feel that IT, and most especially the software part, has some form of terrorist organisation going whose job it is to ensure that the business always looks on IT folks with disdain."

"Pitching REST, WS-*, ESBs etc is exactly what SOA should not be doing. Its about time that IT started looking at genuine business cases and signing up to explicit measures. Who cares if you use REST, WS-* or flying monkeys to do something, if you've committed to delivering a 10% increase in sales then the choice is yours."

"By continually pitching a technology centric view of the world IT will continual to marginalise itself and prevent any genuine progress being
made."

From "Whipping the QA Process Into SOA Shape" By Wayne Ariola:

"Provide visibility. When exposing business information internally, or by sharing data with partners externally, the businesses goal is to demonstrate that each part of its system is reliable. Visibility will ultimately promote trust. Trust will ultimately promote reuse of these business assets."

"Internally, the organization has a distinct goal of promoting reuse of business assets. The challenge of reuse is truly a cultural shift in the way that developers and architects have traditionally delivered projects. Given this long-standing cultural barrier, the quality metrics need to tell a very distinct story for the internal constituents. The data should give the internal organization the confidence and trust that the business asset is robust enough for the application. The negative case is also true: The architect should also be able to determine that the service asset is not robust enough for the specific application."

"Promoting trust for an asset must begin early, as soon as the asset is created. Visibility into asset quality helps drive the development cycle and promotes trust for later reuse. In order to promote trust early, the business must define policies that govern the different aspects of the services life cycle, runtime and design time."

From "What is SOA?" by Eric Roch:

"Many IT focused SOA efforts have become an easy mark those selling SOA products since SOA now requires governance software, registries, an ESB, a SOA Suite or what ever the particular vendor is selling. I recently did an audit of a company that spent $18M on software, hardware and services that had no service oriented applications after 18 months with none in sight. The enterprise architecture group designed it all and had it built but no one knew what applications were going to run on it. I was literally told by IT that when I talked to the business that I could not use the term SOA because they already viewed it as a failure. This is the disasterous results that occur all too often when IT shops take this type of approach to SOA."

"Many have set up knowledge bases, best practices, guidance frameworks, and governance processes. And yet these SOA initiatives invariably stall out." Well maybe these companies should have spend less time installing software and building frameworks and more time understanding what business processes could be impacted by removing poor interfaces or eliminating bottlenecks or providing needed information faster (just to name a few). That “stunningly beautiful SOA infrastructure” is worthless without business applications running on it!"

A few voices on why information governance is important

"Delivering Information Governance or just flogging more kit?" by Ramesh Manghirmalani:

FEW WOULD disagree that their corporate information is probably their biggest strategic asset.../...The problem with corporate information is that it’s inevitably locked up in silos that range in size from one person’s head to another through departments and regions...//...Unlocking such information is a huge challenge that needs to cross the boundaries of technology, politics, people and processes. This is probably one of the biggest challenges faced by reasonably sized organizations.

Here's a press release from Gartner on the subject - "Gartner Says Start Managing Information, Not Just Technology":

Gartner predicts that organisations who do not approach information management in a coordinated, enterprise manner, will fail in the first or second year at a rate of more than 90 per cent. Many organisations want to exploit their information assets and address issues surrounding information overload in order to achieve their efficiency, transparency and differentiation objectives. At the same time, they want to ensure appropriate safeguards and measures are in place to protect sensitive information and minimise risk. Despite the recognition of the importance of the issue, many organisations do not have formal information governance programmes, or coordinated information management strategies in place.

“IT professionals have focused for too long on technology and not enough on information,” said David Newman, research vice-president at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo. “The business expects to have the right information at the right time to get the job done. It also expects information to be accurate and consistent. Furthermore, senior management expects that adequate controls and defined accountabilities are in place to assure compliance and reduce risk. That’s why information governance is top-of-mind among any of our clients today.”

Finally, here’s an overview of information governance, "Mike2.0 Information Governance Overview", shared by Sean McClowry from BearingPoint on slideshare.net:

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Insights about Content Management challenges

"Culling Content Management" by Alan Pelz-Sharpe:

"It's long been a gripe of mine that ECM systems were designed to reduce the amount of content you needed to manage to essentials. Yet instead they often just manage everything - trash along with diamonds...//...It's really not that hard to reduce the volumes of content you manage dramatically - a simple content audit can clear out 70-80% without in anyway impacting your RM policies or frankly even being noticable to the end users. Most everything sitting there anyway is a duplication, is redundant or should never have been there in the first place."

"There once was a firm in Nantucket..." by Bob Larrivee at AIIM:

"If your information management and gathering effort is called into question, you may be asked to prove that you have policies and procedures in place that are followed by your employees, using a consistent structure and taxonomy for storing and managing information that is also tracked for purposes of auditing and reporting."

"Strategies for Improving Enterprise Search - Beyond the Out-of-the-Box Experience" by John Ferrara:

"It’s common for enterprise website developers to implement search engines with out-of-the-box functionality, point it at their content repositories, and then just leave it at that. Search is becoming something of a neglected orphan, in part because packaged search products are relatively easy to implement, and then even more easily forgotten...//...Quality search results only come about through applied effort, requiring in particular the skills of an information architect. And IAs must be ready to go well beyond their traditional front-end role, digging into the functional backend and source data of the search engine."

Approaching Information Quality

Information quality is often a neglected topic, both from the business side and the IT side. Perhaps, it is because information quality is a complex concept that includes many management techniques and quality practices.

Neglecting information quality issues may e.g.:

• lead to extra time and resources to manage and resolve information assets
• initiate a loss of credibility in services
• delay deployments of new applications and integrations
• be an originator of compliance problems
• cause customer and partner dissatisfaction

When starting a quality effort it is often necessary to manage issues from two sides - existing quality issues needs to be sorted out and the occurrence of new issues needs to be minimised.

A quality study often reveals many existing and often serious quality issues. One of the things to deal with is simply where to start hence the actions need to be prioritised. A successful approach can be based on an evaluation of information assets (where quality levels are compared to business importance) and a shortlist of actions (selected by comparing business benefit to business effort).

Realising the actions often requires buy-in from sponsors and stakeholders. The approach is more solid if it can be supported by a business case. The business case should clearly state increased costs and risks as well as possibly lower revenue and confidence. The quality of the business case itself is reliant on e.g. how well the information assets are linked to IT services and business processes.

Minimising the occurrence of new issues may be done at different levels depending on the ambitions of the sponsors and stakeholders. Below is a list of some common actions to consider for the long run:

• Create a information quality strategy to define a practical quality approach and a realistic vision
• Establish a governance of information quality to unite business and IT professionals
• Define appropriate metrics & tools for business focus and results
• Assess master data and information architecture to deal with inconsistencies and sharing problems
• Realise an information quality process and instructions to enable continuous improvements
• Manage awareness and change concerning quality work to secure implementation

A common misconception is that quality is owned by and the responsibility of one group. However, a successful quality effort should lead to the realisation that quality is, and should be, the responsibility of everyone.

The Need For Content Governance

I think most people who have worked with content management in an organization have experienced the following:

• Content products are developed and produced but never or rarely used
• The content that is produced is not always accurate, complete and/or timely when released
• Content defects are not discovered, managed and resolved in a structured way once the content has been released
• The efficiency of content products is not measured
• Content products becomes outdated but are not archived or retired
• Content is not maintained and updated
• Content products do not comply with branding standards and guidelines
• Content does not comply with laws and regulations
• Content falls into the wrong hands and get
• Taxonomies grow wild and become inconsistent and more or less unusable over time

A lot of the content within an enterprise is of great importance or even critical to the enterprise and should therefore be managed with the same respect as other kinds of assets. The reason is, simply speaking, that bad content quality can hurt the enterprise badly. Despite this, many content workers seem to put their faith into technology and simply assume that content will automatically remain complete, correct, fresh and relevant once they have produced and released it. Or even worse, they don't care what happens to it after it has been released the first time.

I have experienced this many times. Often it has to do with the fact that the people that produced the content are no longer responsible and accountable for the content. The content was produced and delivered by a project and then it was left to its own devices once the project closed. If the project deliverables were handed over to someone before the project closed, it was probably handed over to someone in an IT maintenance organization, an organization that was set up to maintain and govern IT solutions – not content. Having the wrong person responsible for managing the content is often worse than having no one responsible for it, because then people tend to believe it is managed when it is not.

So how do you avoid this? Well, first of all it is absolutely essential to have disciplined and skilled people that have the right attitude. This is by far the hardest part. If you are failing here, especially if people's attitude is wrong, then your chances of succeeding are small if not minimal. But if you manage to get disciplined and skilled people with the right attitude by your side, then it is just about establishing and implementing a functioning governance model and getting the right processes, resources, tools and infrastructure in place to manage the content throughout its life-cycle.

When discussing governance models and frameworks, it is important to understand that there is no single model or framework that will suit all organizations. Besides that no organization and enterprise is identical to another, it is often hard to draw distinct lines between different areas of responsibilities. For example, it is hard to draw a distinct line between the management of internet-specific content, intranet-specific content, documents and digital assets. Consequently, it is a better approach to define what needs to be done and what resources and roles are needed to do the work instead of finding a model for how to organize these roles. It is also pretty simple to identify what needs to be done to get well functioning governance, such as:

• Management support
• Policies, standards and guidelines to follow
• Functioning processes
• Clearly defined roles and responsibilities
• Skilled and disciplined people with the right attitude
• Supporting tools and infrastructure
• Routines for auditing and follow up

It is nice to see that so many organizations are getting better and better at governing their IT business. Now they just need to set the same level of ambition for governing their content.