By Carol Newcomb, Senior Consultant
You’re already familiar with the common symptoms: rapid heart rate, shallow breathing, sweaty palms and jumpy behavior. When you are asked to identify the strategy for information management in your organization, your mind draws a blank. “So, I’m not the CIO. Go ask him!” When asked about the most reliable source for master data on customers or contracts or sales force, you mumble, “Try the ERP system. That’s where I found it last time.” Or if an outside contractor were to ask about your 5-year plan for information management and BI strategy, you shrug, puzzled. “What good is a 5-year plan when I don’t even have a 1-year plan? Leave me alone.” Treading water is the mode of survival.
The single most common problem organizations face these days is too much data. It comes from all directions for all sorts of purposes. It comes from dozens of applications designed to fulfill specific functions. It has grown over the years until reluctantly, one of the organization’s leaders says “Enough already!” Data is now costing more to manage than it is contributing to informed decisions. Data is not an asset, it’s a liability! How did this happen? It’s like a teenager’s fantasy: wanting and having, wanting and having, bright shiny objects, more and more, until the sobering realization sinks in that the dream is no longer just a dream—it’s a full-fledged nightmare!
Information management is all about control. Stop. Step back. Get some perspective. Assess the true situation. Itemize what’s good and what’s subpar. Think about what the organization needs to achieve. Think about how the data supports those objectives, not how the organization manages despite its data. Data management is a deliberate, stepwise set of practices designed to ensure that value can be extracted from the data, and that the overhead associated with poor quality, inconsistent definitions, unaligned source systems and discontinuous data management practices are orchestrated to work as a whole. The objective is to deliver information value.
So how do you go about changing from ‘Ready, Shoot, Aim’ to ‘Ready, Aim Shoot’? First, get ready. Admit that survival is not a strategy. Survival is survival, and it is getting more difficult to maintain your organization’s survival, much less its competitive edge. Next, invest the time and resources in drawing that big ugly spaghetti diagram, an inventory of ALL the source applications, software systems, ETL points, staging systems, landing points and delivery channels. Then, take a true inventory of the end-users. This is critical, because this is where data begins to result in business value. Take time to really research who does what with certain pieces of data. Do they further augment it with external data? Do they merge it with other internal or external data? Do they modify it to match other data sources? How much time do they spend cleaning, standardizing or massaging data? Start to build your ROI equation. Data Sources X Time X People = Business Information Cost. How much is this really costing? Where is the value?
As you learn more about how the business uses data, start to lay out a business value matrix (the other side of the ROI equation). This will help prioritize your data management roadmap. Estimate the amount of effort required to integrate each source against the perceived business value, and chart a business value/implementation effort matrix. Consider drafting more than one, as this reflects perceptions more than actual fixed units. Share this information with end users to validate it and socialize a plan. Then start to lay out a tactical roadmap. Aim!
Now you’re getting somewhere! Having faced the ugly reality (Ready) and incorporated real-life facts from business end-users (Aim), you can start to craft your strategy to streamline and rationalize the multiple data lifecycles supported by your organization. Shoot! Prioritize the data sources and systems to begin with, and estimate the expected value. Launch your governance, metadata, quality and delivery resources, and engage your business users each step of the way. Deliver value and repeat. Evaluate the process, refine, and keep going. It’s a deliberate, engaged, transparent and proactive approach, and it’s the only way you will ever conquer those adolescent nightmares!
photo by Erik Charlton (via Flickr)
Carol Newcomb is a Senior Consultant with Baseline Consulting. She specializes in developing BI and data governance programs to drive competitive advantage and fact-based decision making. Carol has consulted for a variety of health care organizations, including Rush Health Associates, Kaiser Permanente, OSF Healthcare, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and more. While working at the Joint Commission and Northwestern Memorial Hospital, she designed and conducted scientific research projects and contributed to statistical analyses.
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