Information Management best_practice_guide

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Exploiting your information: Information is one of your organisation’s most important assets. Handle it correctly, and it will help you deliver improved products and services, cut costs, create happier customers, comply with regulation and many other benefits besides.

Best practice guide

The fundamentals of Information Management

www.ipl.com

The fundamentals of Information Management Version 2.0. © Copyright IPL 2013

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All material contained within this document is the property of the respective author and should not be used

or reproduced without the author’s permission.

© Copyright IPL 2013

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ForewordUnleash the power of your organisation’s information

Peter Aiken PhD is one of the world’s top Data Management authorities and is president of DAMA International, the Data Management Association. He has spent time working at the United States Department of Defense, Deutsche Bank, Nokia and many other large organisations.

He has been a member of the Information Systems Department at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Business since 1993 and jointly owns, with the University, Data Blueprint, a data management and IT consulting firm.

Data and information are everywhere: organisations across the globe are creating a veritable deluge every minute of every day as they go about their business. And these vast quantities can quickly come to threaten your viability and profitability. But the world’s smart organisations are not seeing this information as a threat; instead, it’s an opportunity that can give you a significant advantage over your competitors – so long as you handle it correctly. And that’s what Information Management is all about.

Information Management presents different challenges from other asset management disciplines, such as finance and personnel management. These activities are all about managing scare quantities of the asset, where for Information Management, the opposite is true. The difficulty is in identifying the valuable information so that it can be exploited. And if you are able to do so, the rewards can be significant, namely that you enable your staff to make decisions more quickly and with much greater confidence than they can currently.

To get there, you need to go on a journey that will guarantee the information your organisation is exploiting is discoverable, accurate, trustworthy and timely. Fail to do this, and you’ll just end up making bad decisions more quickly. But get it right, and you’ll be on the road to delivering better products and services in the face of shrinking budgets, having more satisfied customers and, ultimately, enjoying greater profits.

IPL’s Best Practice Guide helps you understand the nature of the information problem, and take your first steps towards doing something about it. Your information is there to be exploited – and now’s the time to do it.

Information Management

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Data Governance

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What is Information Management? Information Management is the execution of a set of principles and processes to derive maximum value from your organisation’s information, while protecting it as a key corporate asset. This information could be structured, semi-structured or completely unstructured.

Fundamentally, if your organisation believes that information really is a valuable strategic asset, then it needs to be managed with similar rigour and discipline as should be your other corporate assets, such as finance and people.

Peter Aiken

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1. See http://bit.ly/imcio

The volume, complexity and criticality of data in just about every organisation – public and private sector – is ballooning, and it would be easy to let this deluge spiral out of control by doing nothing about it. But data and information (that is to say, data in context) are not merely annoyances that must be contained; they are among your organisation’s most important assets, alongside your people and finance. Your information value chain is where data is transformed into information, then knowledge, and finally wisdom or intelligence, and it must be managed effectively. By doing so, you can obtain valuable information, knowledge and intelligence that sets you apart from your competitors. Ultimately, this derived knowledge and intelligence guides every decision your organisation makes.

It’s therefore imperative you put the right information in front of the right people at the right time to enable them to make the right decisions. Furthermore, these decision-makers must be able to trust the information. So, managing your information isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’, it’s a must if you’re to stay ahead of the competition, enjoy the greatest possible benefits to your bottom line, and deliver better services in the face of shrinking budgets.

Getting your Information Management (IM) right will also help you reduce costs, understand your customer and their needs better, ease the burden of regulation and legislative compliance and enable you to react more swiftly to new opportunities.

The rise of unstructured dataTraditionally, the quantity of structured data that organisations are handling in databases has grown at a predictable rate, meaning that putting in place the procedures to manage this information has been more

straightforward than it is now. The change is due to the increase of unstructured data – such as images, videos and the sort of free text found in social networking posts. As this data continues to grow in unpredictable ways, smart organisations should take steps now to handle and exploit it.

The dangers of getting it wrongFailure to manage your organisation’s information will have consequences, ranging from minor annoyances to regulatory fines and other issues that could threaten the company’s survival and the job security or even freedom of your CEO. Gartner, the leading IT research body, went

so far as to predict that by 2016, 20% of CIOs in regulated industries will lose their jobs because they haven’t implemented information governance successfully1.

The spread of internet-ready phones and tablets, combined with the popularity of social media and blogging platforms, means that information can travel faster and to more people than ever before. So if you don’t manage your information properly and the wrong piece of knowledge – or an incorrect piece of knowledge – gets into the public domain, it can spread like wildfire. Depending on its seriousness, this can quickly whip up a PR storm that damages your brand and customer goodwill, even if the information is later shown to be incorrect. The key is to make sure the information you are handling is accurate – and that it is adequately protected.

Information Management is particularly important for any organisation operating in a strictly regulated environment, such as the financial or pharmaceutical sectors. Your ability to comply (and prove you are complying) relies on effective management of your information. Failing to comply with regulation or legislation – or being unable to show you are doing so – will have severe consequences. These range from your directors being prosecuted and potentially jailed, to the firm going out of business as a result of a fine, disciplinary proceedings or loss of customer confidence.

These are two of the more extreme examples of how poor Information Management can be damaging, but there are many more ways in which this can – and does – happen. Someone may order the wrong stock, or a salesman may fail to follow up a potentially lucrative opportunity, both as a result of not having access to the right information at the time they needed it to influence their decisions. Similarly, incorrectly captured or duplicated data could affect the customer experience when they interact with your organisation.

The symptoms of poor IMNearly all organisations will have areas of Information Management that they could improve on. The symptoms of poor Information Management can show themselves in everyday situations, most obviously when it comes to knowledge management, including:

• The inability to find the information you need to make a decision.

• Not knowing where to look or who to ask for a particular piece of information.

• Not knowing if your organisation possesses a given piece of information.

• Several individuals giving different answers to the same question.

• Different business queries that you believe should return the same results actually provide different results.

• Lack of coherent Master Data for key corporate data areas.

• No accountability for managing the information asset within the organisation.

There are many other ways in which poor Information Management can show itself in an organisation. Ultimately, however it manifests itself, it is damaging in some way, and smart businesses will move fast to put in place measures to get it right, so that they can reap long-term benefits. These measures are a combination of processes, people and technology: the latter alone cannot adequately manage your organisation’s information.

The importance of good Information Management

Understand why you must manage your information, and spot the signs that you’re not

Chris is a well-published author, thought leader and regular speaker on Information Management. He has worked in IM for over three decades and continues to advise well-known multinationals on how to govern and exploit their information.

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“Smart businesses will move fast to get their IM right”

Chris Bradley

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Information Management is a wide-ranging discipline that affects every member of staff in your organisation. The ultimate goal of putting in place an Information Management strategy is to deliver valuable, trusted intelligence to your decision-makers when they need it, and thereby offer better products and services at a lower cost. At this stage, it may seem tempting to go running down the quick-fix road of implementing a point technology solution to help exploit your information – such as a collaboration system for knowledge management. After all, this could rapidly put information at the fingertips of your staff to help them do their jobs.

However, while doing this may indeed speed up decision-making, how do you know they’re the right decisions? By putting in place an information exploitation or knowledge management tool without assessing the quality or provenance of the information being fed into it, you cannot be sure the intelligence it is producing is trustworthy, and therefore whether the decisions you are making based on it are the right ones. This is why you need to start your Information Management initiative by putting in place strong Data Governance foundations. Your organisation and all its staff need to recognise that data is a crucial asset, and to treat it accordingly.

To this end, you must put the right people in the right roles throughout the company to look after your information, and implement Data Governance principles, policies, standards, processes and procedures. These are required to ensure data is handled in the right way, such that you can ensure your organisation’s information is accurate, timely and trustworthy.

All about the peopleMany organisations today have a Chief Information Officer, or CIO, who has ultimate responsibility for the firm’s data. Typically, this individual will have been an IT or technology professional, prior to becoming CIO. Having this kind of background may lead to more emphasis being placed on the technology side of things than on the information side. A technology-focused CIO may believe that an IT system is sufficient to manage the organisation’s information, when in fact it is only part of the solution.

For this reason, it is best to have someone from a business background on the board as well, who can champion the case for proper Data Governance procedures, which will ensure any technology solution delivers the desired benefits.

This role is becoming known as the Chief Data Officer (CDO), who is in charge of the information and knowledge side of things. Having a CDO creates a separation from the existing, technology-focused CIO, who can become the Chief Technology Officer. This will create a balance at management level to put in place an Information Management strategy and structures that will deliver benefits long into the future.

The building blocks of Data GovernanceYour Data Governance work must be underpinned by a set of principles, which will guide and govern the more specific policies, standards, processes and procedures that you put in place. The principles should be specific to your organisation’s business needs, and would typically include statements such as ‘data is not duplicated’ and ‘data is shared by default’.

The next step is to develop your Data Governance policies, guided by the above principles. Develop a range of policies relating to areas such as Data Quality Management, Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence and Metadata Management. These must be applied throughout your organisation and reviewed regularly.

Having a series of Data Management standards – and knowing your organisation is adhering to them – will demonstrate effective data management control, though this isn’t explicitly part of Data Governance. These standards could include document and report templates or static data definitions and lookups. Most importantly, you must be sure your organisation adheres to the policies and standards you put in place, and you’ll most likely need a carefully defined approach to how you’ll do this.

To apply the principles, policies and standards we’ve talked about, you need to understand the business processes within your organisation that affect the management of data and information. Review these to identify any improvements that are required and where new processes for Data Governance are needed. Crucially, the processes must be designed to ensure data is being managed as an asset, and this typically requires you to consider how humans will alter data during its lifecycle. To this end, staff will probably require specific procedures to follow.

Procedures direct staff on how to perform a specific task, and are required as part of your Data Governance groundwork to ensure the principles, policies and standards are followed.

While putting the above principles, policies, standards, processes and procedures in place may seem like a time-consuming task, it is an investment well worth making. By doing so, you will have built a rock-solid foundation on which you can now create systems to help exploit your information, and thereby offer better products and services at a lower cost.

Laying the Data Governance groundwork

Successful Information Management needs to be built on strong foundations

Ian is an Information Management specialist, who has designed and delivered Data Governance structures at major public sector organisations.

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“Your staff need to recognise that data is a crucial asset”

Ian Sinclair

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Building on your foundationsTake the next steps towards exploiting your organisation’s data

What direction your Information Management journey takes once you have put your Data Governance foundations in place depends on your organisation’s priorities. To begin, you need to identify the areas that offer the greatest business value in the shortest possible time: the quick wins. Throughout the process, remember why it is you’re assessing and making changes to your Information Management processes: namely to exploit your information better, so that every decision-maker in your organisation is able to make the right choices more quickly.

Below, we’ll look at some of the areas you’re likely to need to assess. Remember that attempting to change the world overnight is unrealistic: start where you can bring your organisation the most benefit, and then move on to other areas. Disciplines where you are likely to need improvements include Master Data Management, Data Quality, Information Assurance and Data & Information Structuring.

Improving your Master Data ManagementMaster Data describes the ‘things’ of significance within your organisation – the key nouns in your business vocabulary. These don’t all need managing, so Master Data focuses on the ones that are created or updated in several places, long-lived, valuable, complex or reused. In essence, it’s the data that’s important to multiple areas of your business, and needs to be handled consistently – a simplistic example would be whether you talk about ‘cars’ or ‘vehicles’. Master Data Management looks at ensuring this important data is correctly managed across your organisation, ensuring that the right data is delivered to the right place when it is needed. Because as soon as inconsistencies like car vs vehicle creep in, the chance of errors in the data being displayed increases, with potentially severe consequences for your organisation.

The first task is to identify your candidate Master Data, as part of a Data Asset Plan. Once you do this, you can design, build, deliver and operate the right controls to ensure it is managed as a critical asset and that the governance policies you devise are suitable for the areas that will consume or amend the data.

Selecting the right data and bringing it under Master Data Management control is a complex process. This kind of initiative typically focuses on technology. However, you should first take into account factors such as business ownership and Data Quality. Understanding the current business footprint of your Master Data subject area will ensure you implement and deploy appropriate software to manage Master Data across your entire organisation.

Assuring the quality of your dataAnother area where you almost certainly need to make improvements before you can begin reliably exploiting your organisation’s information is in the quality of your data. Data Quality looks at the accuracy, coverage and currency of data, and a problem in any one of these areas can be a major contributor to poor decisions, failures to comply with regulation and legislation and eroded customer satisfaction. As a result, they pose a significant risk, and you need to monitor, measure and strive to improve your Data Quality continually.

Data Quality problems may arise from the design of your applications, where free text fields, for example, can lead to the wrong data being entered. In the medium to long term, you should look to fix this kind of issue, because it is the root cause of your poor Data Quality. Tweak the systems that are allowing the poor-quality data to be created. However, if this isn’t possible in the short term, put in place measures to monitor and repair the data as it is created.

The best way to assess the current state of play when it comes to Data Quality in your organisation is to run an audit. This can typically be carried out reasonably quickly – generally within a few weeks. An audit would start by identifying appropriate target data sets, and then analysing the data in detail. Following this, the auditors would collate the results and produce a report and recommendations to improve matters and monitor for future problems.

Once you know that the data your organisation is using is of high quality, you will be able to trust the knowledge and intelligence you derive from it, and therefore take decisions with greater confidence at every level.

“Identify the areas that offer the greatest business value in the shortest possible time”

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Trevor Hodges

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Information AssuranceEnsuring that your data is of high quality is important, but you also need to be able to prove that this is the case. For a given piece of data or information, you must be capable of showing where it has come from, when it has been manipulated, and who has edited it. Having this data lineage means that you can make decisions with your eyes fully open, understanding the provenance of the data.

Having an audit trail is especially important in any sector that is strictly regulated, where you must be able to show convincingly that your organisation is complying. An Information Assurance strategy with full data lineage will provide you with the required audit trail for your data, so that you know what you can and can’t rely on when it comes to making decisions and complying with regulation and legislation.

Building the right data structuresPutting in place and imposing the right information and data structures will ensure your staff can get to the information they need and work with it as efficiently as possible. Traditionally, in the world of structured data, the structure is by definition known and clearly defined from the start, most probably in the design of a database. However, semi-structured and unstructured data will not be stored in a structured database. This means that if you want to search and exploit it, you need to impose some kind of structure onto it retrospectively.

There are tools that can help you structure your data in a useful way. It’s vital you put in place the right structures across the board from the start, from your low-level physical data model, through the logical and conceptual data models to your subject area model. If you simply leave the structures – both in your databases and your filesystems – to develop organically as data is added to them, the whole landscape will descend into chaos. With data stored all over the place, it will become difficult to find and exploit it – in effect, recreating the sorts of information silos that you need to eradicate.

As you design your data structures, think about the environment they will operate in: there will be compliance issues and security requirements, for example. More important, though, is the need to ensure your data structures work for the staff that will be using them. They should fit in – as far as possible – with their existing ways of working, so that complying requires minimal effort. If you don’t, and the systems are difficult or slow to use, people will revert to creating their own, local structures for data, rendering worthless your efforts to make your organisation’s entire body of data exploitable. It’s therefore vital that you keep these things in mind before you start looking at software procurement.

Once you’ve put the relevant building blocks in place to assure the quality and structure of your data, you can start to look at exploiting it to aid your decision-making with confidence.

“It’s vital you put in place the right data structures across the board from the start”

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Trevor has worked in Information Management consultancy for more than a decade, including assisting oil giant Statoil with its corporate Master Data Management programme.

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Exploiting your organisation’s information

With the groundwork in place, you can reap the benefits of good Information Management

The goal of any Information Management improvement initiative is to enable your organisation to make better decisions, and thereby offer improved services, reduce risk and increase profit. As a result of the solid foundations you’ve laid down by putting in place the Data Governance groundwork, processes for Data Quality, Master Data Management and suitable Information Assurance processes and structures, you can exploit your information with confidence, safe in the knowledge that the intelligence you are basing your decisions on is both timely and accurate.

The key to doing this is by presenting your information effectively, using Business Intelligence. And depending on the goals of your Information Management initiative, you may also need an Enterprise Search facility.

Presenting your information To exploit your information successfully, you need to present it to the right people at the right time, in the most appropriate format. The key to doing this is to focus on the business needs of your decision-makers, rather than starting from a technology perspective. Before you design your reports or build an Enterprise Data Warehouse, take time to really understand your users: what do their jobs require them to do? What kind of information do they need at a given time? It may be insufficient simply to ask such questions of the users: a workshop or in-depth study of their role could be what’s needed to unearth the insights that will enable your Business Intelligence professionals to deliver reports that genuinely help them do their jobs better.

By fully understanding your users and the outcomes they require, you can begin to put in place the Data Warehouse and Data Integration procedures to deliver the data

from your organisation’s systems into the reports that will enable your users to exploit it. The Data Warehouse must be carefully designed to make it straightforward for report creators to find the data they require, while the Data Integration processes – which typically include extract-transform-load (ETL) – can take time to get right. The benefit of spending this time is that the reports will be of the greatest value to your users, thus enabling them to make better-informed decisions more quickly.

Some reporting tools, such as Microsoft’s Power View, enable end users to create their own reports, charts and more using intuitive drag-and-drop features that require little or no training to use. This will help them be more productive, and means you won’t necessarily need to wait for your Business

Intelligence specialists to deliver new reports. Work with your decision-makers to understand who would benefit from such self-service, to what extent it should be offered, and take steps to deliver it.

As with other areas of your Information Management work, your reporting capability can be delivered in phases: experience shows that an iterative approach to Business Intelligence is suitable in most situations, building each iteration on strong foundations. The key to this approach is to make sure you deliver visible business value in each phase. This will underline the benefits of what you are doing, and help secure buy-in for later instalments.

Enterprise SearchWhen delivering any system designed to exploit your information, it needs to be able to find things effectively from across the organisation. To enable this, you need a reliable Enterprise Search tool. This may be

one that your decision-makers use directly, or it may be a behind-the-scenes facility that your data presentation systems use.

It’s absolutely critical that the search system delivers reliable results, because users will otherwise revert to less efficient, unreliable methods of storing and finding information, such as saving local copies. This will lead to the sorts of Data Quality issues you’ve worked hard to eradicate.

Firstly, the search tool must be powerful enough to cope with growing quantities of information: can it scale up to meet future demands? If you’re searching semi-structured and unstructured data, you’ll need a more powerful tool than if you were only accessing structured datasets. However, there isn’t a need to spend lots of money on a tool that includes features you simply don’t need. Fancy browsing tools are not required if a textual search gets you the information quickly.

Second, for your search tool to work effectively, the data will need to have been tagged appropriately and thoroughly when it was created or stored, using terms from an established taxonomy or thesaurus. The taxonomy should evolve over time as your organisation’s needs change, to ensure it remains relevant.

Making confident decisionsCrucially, because you’ve put in place structures to manage your information properly – from creation to exploitation – you can have every confidence in what is being supplied to your employees. And by extension, therefore, you know that your decision-makers – from board-level to new graduates – are able to make the best-informed choices possible to drive your organisation forward. This will see you able to deliver improved products and services, lower risk and cost, better compliance and, ultimately, greater profits.

Richard is an experienced Business Intelligence architect who has played a major role on information exploitation projects at clients including the Financial Services Authority and BP.

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