Chapter 15 15-1 © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. Publishing as Prentice Hall.

Information Delivery: IT’s Evolving Role

Chapter 15

15-1© 2012 Pearson Education, Inc.  Publishing as Prentice Hall

© 2012 Pearson Education, Inc.  Publishing as Prentice Hall

Information and IT: Why Now?

The amount of information today is overwhelming.The average knowledge worker spends more than one quarter of their day searching for information. (Kontzer,2003)

Information has considerable value.Good Information Management + Excellent Systems yields Strong Financial Performance.

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Information and IT: Why Now? Continued

Information embedded in workflows is valuable.Transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge results in structural capital.Financial accountability legislation has driven the need for greater information integrity.New technologies create new information opportunities. 15-3

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Areas Where Information Delivers Value

More Efficient Business Operations – Dashboards combine transaction, process and supply-chain metrics to give a more detailed view of operations.

Dashboards provide drill-down, highlight problem areas and integrate information from several systems. 15-4

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Areas Where Information Delivers Value Continued

E-Business – Forced organizations to resolve internal data inconsistencies, identify information gaps, and deal with inadequate information offerings.

The Web has enabled more efficient transactions and expanded supply chains.

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Areas Where Information Delivers Value Continued

Internal Self-Service – The Web is simplifying employee access to organizational information.

Intranets have changed the way information is presented, navigated, and processed.

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Areas Where Information Delivers Value Continued

Unstructured Information Delivery – records management, library management and document management have caused a convergence of structured and unstructured information.

E-mail and instant messaging have become important channels of delivery. 15-7

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Areas Where Information Delivers Value Continued

Business Intelligence – Includes both data mining and external competitor information.

Data mining requires IT to understand the context of how information will be used.

Data Warehouse technologies are a key to supporting this environment. 15-8

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Areas Where Information Delivers Value Continued

Behavior Change – Increasing more sophisticated metrics and scorecards are used to measure corporate performance.

People pay attention to what is measured.

Highlighting key information helps staff focus. 15-9

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New Information Skills Needed Within IT

Political judgment

Information analysis

Workflow analysis

Information access

Business rules for information use

Usability

Information navigation

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IT Information Responsibilities

Data custodianship

Storage

Integration

Presentation

Security

Administration

Personalization and multilingual presentations

Document indexing and searching

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IT Information Responsibilities Continued

Unstructured content management and workflow

Network and server infrastructure for information hosting/staging

Team collaboration software

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Business Responsibilities for Information

Ownership

Quality

Currency

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The Information Management Life Cycle

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Figure 15-1

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The Information Management Life Cycle Continued

Capture – Includes all activities in identifying information for possible use.

May include digitizing documents.

Will require capturing external business intelligence information.

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The Information Management Life Cycle Continued

Organize – Involves indexing, classifying and linking sources together.

Involves taxonomy creation (systematic categorization by keyword or term).

Facilitates ease of access.15-16

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The Information Management Life Cycle Continued

Process – Leverages the value of information using new information-delivery technologies.

Involves analyzing vast amounts of information into structural capital that is valued by businesspeople.

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The Information Management Life Cycle Continued

Maintain – All information must be assessed as to its meeting the business needs.

Standards and principles must be established for information retention, preservation, and disposal.

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Information Deliver Best Practices

Approach information delivery as an iterative development project. No one gets it right the first time.

Separate data from function to create greater flexibility.

Buy data models and enhance them. This will save many person-years of effort.

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Information Deliver Best Practices Continued

Use middleware to translate data from one system to another. This is especially true for companies using multiple packaged systems with their own embedded data models.

Evolve towards a real-time single-source customer information file. This will support privacy and ease new integrated product and service offerings. 15-20

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Information Deliver Best Practices Continued

Design information delivery from the end user (whether external customer, employee, or supplier) backward. This substantially reduces internal in-fighting and focuses attention on what is really important.

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The Future of Information Delivery

An Internet for Physical Information – This includes the ability to track and remotely monitor a product at any point in time. This massive influx of information will create challenges in the coming decade.

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The Future of Information Delivery Continued

Network-centric Operations – It will soon be possible to collect, create, distribute, and exploit information across any platform. This will be enabled by:- Sensor grids- High quality information- Value-added command and control processes.

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The Future of Information Delivery Continued

Self-synchronizing Systems –Information will support self-synchronization of complex work activities without management intervention.

Feedback Loops – Feedback mechanisms will requires new metrics for factors such as transparency, information sharing, and trust.

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The Future of Information Delivery Continued

Informal Information Management – Information delivery mechanisms of the future will look to organize and leverage informal information kept by knowledge workers.

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Conclusion

It is only recently that businesses have discovered the power and potential of information.New technologies and channels make it possible to access information cheaply and easily.Information is being used to drive different types of value in the organization.

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