Let’s Talk: Creating an Adaptive Information Edge

By Kitty Piercy, Mayor of Eugene, Oregon, 2007 State of the City Report

Surging oil and energy costs, the threat of climate change caused by global warming, the need to develop new clean energy sources, growing income disparity and shifts in job markets, and our ability to compete in a global economy - these and other challenges require vision and leadership. By Kitty Piercy, Mayor of Eugene, Oregon, 2007 State of the City Report

“It's challenging to create data governance processes that cross multiple departments and business units to protect data, meet business goals and comply with regulations.”
-David Newman, Gartner

Companies that thrive continuously re-align business teams to evolving strategies. They keep everyone on the same page by delivering critical information to ever broader audiences. Effectively managing and governing that delivery demands new approaches and collaboration between business and technology.

Bridging the Communication Divide

"Suddenly, IT departments everywhere have been charged by the CEO, CFO, and Audit Committee with making the company compliant, because many of the laws carry personal liability penalties for officers and directors of corporations." Tony Noblett, Microsoft Corporation

"Governing corporate data may be slightly easier than governing nations ... It's challenging to create data governance processes that cross multiple departments and business units to protect data, meet business goals and comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley," David Newman, Gartner

Adaptive solutions meet this challenge by bringing the voices of business and technology together, uniting subject matter experts with the business users who rely upon them. Together they communicate, collaborate and network their expertise to transform data into information and define the appropriate governance of critical assets and processes. By serving business needs today they also lay the foundation for consolidating and simplifying information management over time.

Adaptive streamlines collaboration between business and technology, merging complimentary perspectives into a single view for today, and a common vision for the future.

Deliver Value Early and Often

Adaptive customers benefit from a foundation of mature technology to begin immediately delivering clear business value. Based on over a decade of continual advances and adhering closely to industry standards, our solutions ensure the highest degree of interoperability across a broad range of activities. Adaptive solutions allow you to quickly deploy exciting services for users of all types:

• Collaborate Across a Network of Experts
  • Locate and leverage Subject Matter Experts
  • Define a vocabulary for how you do business and why
  • Contribute personal knowledge for reuse by others
  • Highlight peer recognition for contributions and excellence
  • Exchange best practices and common solutions
  • Raise awareness and communicate successes
• Create Step-by-Step Wizards and Guides
  • Respond to Data Governance issues and track outcomes
  • Contribute a new Business Glossary entry
  • Report the current state of critical data quality
  • Identify potential source data for a new report
• Provide Rich Graphical Interaction
  • Map high level concepts like classifications to actual data objects
  • Leverage familiar images and concepts to create rich navigation maps
  • Display exactly how data moves from one place to another
  • Represent the past, present and future state of information management
• Automate Workflow and Change Management
  • Allow users to contribute expertise freely and visibly
  • Automate peer reviews and official publication processes
  • Define processes tailored to your information culture
  • Collaborate on updating and managing information
  • Facilitate re-use, and manage change over different scenarios and timescales

Five Critical Qualities of Information Management

Much of the discussion around data management is focused on data quality. This has served to highlight the importance of "good data" as a highly desirable outcome, but frames the problem too narrowly, ignoring four other qualities impacting the effectiveness of your information. In addition, you need to consider availability, timeliness, meaning and security.

Data Quality: Is the information complete, consistent and formatted in a way that preserves its representation of the events within your company that it has recorded? Accuracy also requires that the data does not contain duplicate or redundant records that skew financial reports or marketing campaigns.

Data Availability: Can the people who need data find it, and then arrange for it to be delivered? This may also include determining which data sources are to be made available and which should be restricted due to inaccuracy or conflicting results. People, when faced with multiple sources for the same data, will typically choose the path of least resistance. This often leads to very similar data being extracted from various systems. This creates a tangle of sourcing strategies resulting in nobody knowing which source to trust.

Data Timeliness: Is the data current enough for the intended usage? How important is real-time data which carries a significant cost in the form of advanced technology? You should decide how important that ideal is in comparison to the actual usage proposed. It may also be something that you want to pursue selectively. Strategic planning needs differ dramatically from those of a customer service call center. Also, don't confuse timeliness with accuracy. Data can be accurate but too stale to meet your actual needs.

Data Meaning: Does your marketing team use the term customer in the same way that your financial team uses it for accounts receivable processing? How do you distinguish between the various types of customers have you may have? And what other words to you use to refer to customers?

Data Security: How well do you protect your critical data from being damaged or stolen? While protection of sensitive customer data receives much attention, you should also consider how it is being stored, archived and made recoverable if a disaster should occur. To understand the importance of this concern, simply ask yourself how much impact it would have on your business if your entire list of customers and their interaction with your company were to simply disappear.

Four Contexts for Business Value

The five qualities of data management listed above have little value in themselves. Business context establishes why they are important. While every company has a unique blend of specific drivers, we will use four general quadrants to talk about what drives decisions.

Find Your Market: Every business must understand potential and existing customers, and determine their needs. Then they must develop an approach to meeting them. Marketing and sales activities drive this area.

Deliver to Your Market: Delivery means getting your products and services into the hands of customers once the sale is complete. Process cycle times play a critical role in analyzing your health in this area.

Operate Your Business: Financial and organizational support keeps your employees and vendors paid while making sure you get paid as well. Typical activities include payroll and human resource management, performance incentive programs, physical facilities coordination.

Manage Risk and Regulation: The evolving industry of Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) is still new to many companies, and may seem irrelevant to many. It becomes a critical capability, however, as companies grow. It often acts as a driver for process maturity. Many companies find that well coordinated GRC responses tend to improve the quality of data management in other areas as well. Conversely, if the quality of data management suffers significantly in a critical area of your business, this will likely become a GRD concern as well.

Getting to the Best Balance of Information Qualities

One practical approach to guiding investment is to identify key initiatives with specific issues. Initiatives directly associated with the four business contexts listed above assure that you can begin to communicate how your investment will deliver clear and concrete value. A simple mapping exercise will identify which quadrants are suffering most significant pain, which quality of Information Management needs to be improved and in what order. The resulting chart becomes a great strategic planning tool that allows your technical teams to clearly understand priorities and concerns.

√ = satisfactory  ! = known issues  ? = potential issues

Culture Counts

However cliché it may sound, each company has a unique balance of business drivers. And each has a culture that reflects that balance. Driving Quality of Data Management to the appropriate level requires understanding where your company is currently situated in terms of business drivers, and then leveraging your culture accordingly.

At one end of the spectrum, certain companies are highly driven by the need to find markets and value that above all else. They need to establish an effective view of potential customers above all else. Business operations and Governance, Risk and Compliance are far less pressing. Delivery to market may even become a secondary priority, at least in the early, most exciting stages of growth. This engenders a culture where concerns over the Quality of Data Management will be highly focused on very specific concerns.

At the other end of the spectrum might be companies that have reached a high degree of maturity in their business growth. An aircraft manufacturer, for example, would prioritize Governance, Risk and Compliance due simply to the magnitude of consequences when they make a fail to detect a process flaw. Market delivery, business operations and Governance, Risk and Compliance at least equal the importance of finding markets. In such a company, establishing a comprehensive Quality of Data Management receives far more support, and is likely to become a principle reflected in the culture of that company.

Find the best approach for data governance means understanding how your culture works and how best to work within that culture to be successful. Certain fundamental characteristics can help orient your program at a high-level.

Committee versus Community

Experts often talk of two basic forces which can be marshaled to generate momentum and sustain data governance effort. The choice of which best suits a particular company depends upon culture, especially the style of leadership available in sponsoring information management as a critical business capability.

In situations where top-down mandate exists, clearly chartered committees are seen by some as the best way to bring together key decision makers who can mandate and delegate actions cross the enterprise. They serve as forums for creating common goals and cooperative relationship. Committees are typically seen as most effective when formed through top-down mandate. Self-appointed committees are seldom seen to have the necessary influence over processes and resource decisions.

Where top-down mandate is lacking, significant opportunities still exist. You can leverage the power of communities, often referred to as communities of practice. Peer recognition is a strong motivating force amongst professionals. The harvesting of good practices, coupled with recognition for those who create them, provide an organic approach to building consensus. Communication plans and gradual gains in momentum build over time, accumulating in a general wisdom that pervades widely. Mentoring, skills development and certification are all important mechanisms meeting the professional drive to achieve career portability. Wikis and other new collaborative tools are often seen to be promising in support of these communities.

Adaptive Information Edge

Adaptive delivers the most comprehensive solution available for organizing, managing and governing complex data and information environments today while steadily improving them for tomorrow. Raise the quality of your information management through advanced capabilities in collaboration, networking in-house experts, and step-by-step wizards and guides, combined with rich graphical visualization and automated workflow and change management.