Tag Archives: ECM - Page 3

Information as an asset – part II

Posted by on October 24, 2011 No comments

Last week I wrote about importance of treating the information as an asset. The bottom line is that due to its intangibility, its value is difficult to measure, and thus more often than not, totally neglected and ignored. However, unless the value is shown, the managers will continue sidelining information management projects, unwillingly leading the organizations further into information overload chaos.

So is there any practical advice how to approach the value information estimation?  There is no simple answer as every organization perceives and uses information in different ways. However, like with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, certain set of rules could be worked out allowing building foundation for estimation model.

Why do we need it?

With hundreds of projects, that organizations need to allocate limited financial and human resources, information management projects, usually are low on the list. Exceptions are fancy pet projects, like for example – implementing latest trendy applications. Often such projects bring limited benefits to the organization comparing with costs and efforts invested. Usually their business cases have financial models built on shaky numbers, basing primarily on soft benefit estimations, often discounted by accountants.

The reason why we want to estimate value of information is to make sure that the scarce resources are channeled to these projects that address needs related to what is most important to the organization. The segmentation of the information value could be done from the following three perspectives:

–          Business need – when information is part of the business workflow; related to improvements in productivity; when information is taking direct part in marketing strategy or it needs to be visible to external business stakeholders. Key role here also plays ensuring single version of truth – when the organization wants to make sure that the decisions are made based on latest version of information. The business need also includes improvement of the productivity by allowing users to find the information faster, but also to spend less time managing information that does not have to be managed to the same degree (ex. transitional records). Pareto rule applies here pretty well – spend 80% of your time on managing 20% of the most important informational artifacts.

–          Risk – organization needs to comply with legal, regulatory or statutory requirements; needs to provide evidence of business decisions, activities and transactions

–          Costs – to replace the information or costs related to acquire information, licensing and subscriptions

The value of information is realized only through its use and this should be criteria for its measurement. However – the ‘use’ is totally subjective. Attempts to measure information value by representing it through more tangible dimensions like availability through business intelligence tools or data volume cannot be successful. For example, in case of BI – the way how well information is aggregated cannot determine capabilities of organization’s management. On the other hand, volume of data does not reflect its quality, content or ability to find information within it.

Valuation approaches

As mentioned above, the valuation of the information is often complex due its dependency on many, often intangible factors. However there are some situation that the straight valuation could be done. But first let’s put some groundwork. There are two types of approaches:

–          Qualitative – tending to be subjective, describing information in terms of some categorization, often informal

–          Quantitative – based on hard numbers and as such, more objective and reproducible

The information valuation fits somewhere in the continuum between purely qualitative and purely quantitative. The degree of how close it will be to either side of the spectrum will depend on type of information, how it is used, its purpose, type of business organization, risks impacts, organizational culture and so on. The organization needs to develop set of classes for its informational assets and categorize the assets accordingly. Once this is done, various strategies to manage the information and prioritization of related projects will be possible.

 

The development of such set of classes should be governed by some basic principles.

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Information as an assset

Posted by on October 3, 2011 No comments

In some business areas, concept of an asset is fairly well developed. From one perspective the key motivator is usage and maintenance of the assets, from the other side, there is the financial aspect – how accountants perceive the assets and how they depreciate over time. The financial aspect is a great motivator to keep the process clean, as usually it is regulated and affects the bottom line of the company. On the other hand, the usage and maintenance of the physical assets, is less structured but easily understandable. You can see it, you can touch it, if you don’t maintain it, it will stop working.

Financial assets in certain way are different – however their management process is well developed as it is primary vehicle for increasing of the revenues, and mostly is regulated. The same motivating factor of proper accounting plays significant role.

Information as an asset – is much more difficult concept to grasp, and often neglected. One of the reasons is that the accountants don’t know how to book it, so the underlying motivating factor as described above, is simply not there. The only time when organizations dig-in their heels with regards to information – is during contract negotiations when it comes to protection of intellectual property. Otherwise the information is allowed to float with little structure, little oversight, protection and management. However, the information is the asset and as the asset it has its own intrinsic value. That’s true, it is difficult to measure it, nevertheless organizations need to define information as the asset and integrate its lifecycle with their overall operational and financial processes. It becomes even more important, when the focus of the company shifts from delivery of physical goods to services.

The same stages of the asset life-cycle are valid with the information:

  • creation
  • storage and preservation
  • management
  • use
  • disposal

Information shares some of the attributes with the physical assets – for example – being time variant. As it ages, information’s value usually decreases, and this needs to be factored-in when developing information value estimation model.

The most important aspect however is that the information value is realized only when it is used. Information that cannot be found is worthless. That is why ability to search and find information is key element of information management. Technology is less important here, development of right taxonomy, classification, controlled vocabularies with ability to tag information at the point of creation – play key role here.

Therefore to be successful, organizations need to:

  • Define information life-cycle and its value
  • Integrate the information life-cycle with overall operational and financial processes of the organization
  • Define information architecture and keep it up to date

Managing Risks in Information Management Programs

Posted by on July 4, 2011 No comments

Information Management projects belong to most challenging in my opinion. One of the reasons is the degree of uncertainty related to current state of data, and usually duration of the program. Although there are discrete steps within ECM programs that are handled by specific projects, overall duration of the initiative is pretty long. This makes such initiatives sensitive to changing environment, political landscape changes within organization, changing external laws and regulations and so on.

Managing risks is key factor in achieving success in the program. Risks must be managed constantly, maybe not weekly, but definitely should be reviewed at least monthly. In my current organization we set up monthly Risk Review Board consisting of individuals representing various aspects of ECM program – including  business analysis, technology, architecture, change management and governance. During our meetings we focus on new risks that appear, prioritization and working out mitigation plans for 20% of them (according to Pareto law – 80% of biggest threats comes from 20% of risks). Risks are assigned to owners who need to manage them, and report back on their status.

We have to be transparent to the stakeholders communicating the biggest risks, although this needs to be done in a way that takes into account their level of tolerance. We do not want to create panic when it is not necessary. This is the point where program manager’s experience comes into play. If we are confident that we can handle these, we should provide brief statement about the risks showing confidence in handling them. Only risks that are outside of program manager’s influence,  requiring stakeholders stepping in to mitigate them, should be worked out in detail.  After all, this is similar to flying a plane. It is sufficient for the captain to say to passengers to fasten belts due to entering into turbulence area,  rather than getting into details that the autopilot has just stopped working.

Chaos or Agile?

Posted by on June 11, 2011 No comments

Recently I have had conversation with a project manager claiming that he was running project in an ‘agile’ way. The project is performing poorly with constantly missed deadlines, missed deliverables, and poor quality. This response came when I asked for project plan. Well – there is one but it doesn’t reflect what happened or what is currently going on with this project.

Although I am all for using Agile approach, especially in enterprise content management and records management projects, but Agile is not synonymous to Chaos. Obviously this project manager is using word ‘agile’ to create smoke screen and hide what is really going on behind the scenes, but I noticed that this is becoming a common trend among project managers nowadays. The problem is that ‘agile’ became a buzzword for organizations that are in quest of finding a magic solution to their chronic delivery problems. Agile will work, but only in mature organizations with mature teams, but it could make things worse in organizations that still lack of foundations of good delivery.

In the strong, prescribed methodologies it was easier to spot when things were going wrong, so it was easier to remediate. Obviously they went wrong from the very beginning, starting with development of rigid requirements that often did not address what the end client wanted. The requirements became substitute for communication with the end users, so end result was often not what the client was expecting, and the biggest enemy became word ‘the change request’.

Agile still needs to have a plan, however a plan that adopts to changing environment, business needs and dynamics within project team itself. There must be controls in place to identify when project is getting off track. These controls are different than in traditional world. This difference is related to different approach. In traditional world the problem was handed over from the business to technical team to deliver solution. The ‘agile’ way is not to have distinction between business and technology – it is only one team delivering solution, consisting of business and technical people. There is no more shifting of the accountabilities and responsibilities between the two. There is a team resolving business problem. This leads to shift in way how the projects are measured. The shift is from the project centric reliance on how the project is doing in terms of the triple constraints, to delivery of business value and tangible results and this is how the projects should be measured. The budget and time are still important and fundamental to the project, but the focus should be on delivery of business value.

This is the point where project management becomes more art than science – balancing act between rigid approach and the chaos on the other side. But Agile is not synonymous with Chaos.

Do you have budget for ECM intiatives?

Posted by on May 12, 2011 No comments

If you are like most of us – I am sure you are facing the same problem – there is not enough money to implement full Enterprise Content Management program. Programs like this, require substantial amount of money, multi-year commitment, strong executive sponsorship and so on. Even if there is some money allocated to some of ECM initiative, the fact that duration is usually longer then 12 months alone make such initiatives vulnerable to changing fiscal environment within the organization and external markets.

Recent Garter’s research among CIOs found out that organizations will be spending less on IT initiatives through 2015. This means rationalization of IT assets, delivery efficiency improvements,  and business process optimization. When you think about this – lot of these initiatives could be supported by decent information management, however it is not clearly visible and most of IT managers, CIOs and CFOs look for hard benefits.

So what could be done to continue with information management projects in such uncertain times? One is obvious – develop information management strategy and roadmap, and then constantly build support and sell new IM projects. The other – ‘guerrilla approach’ is to push information management foundational initiatives as part of other projects – even if their primarily goal is not directly related to information management. For example – to deliver Enterprise Information Architecture – look for current projects that need to develop such piece as part of the project. By influencing – some of these initiatives could be expanded to include informational assets scans in particular business area, existing information management processes, metadata, procedures and so on. Gathering these together could become beginning of EIA and help with developing of governance. To be successful with this however, there should be a group of people driving this, and which has some visibility and influence over the existing projects. In larger organizations – perfectly suitable is IT Architecture group. Most of the projects require their services, and they could influence the scope of the projects. Obviously it requires lot of sensitivity and balance to execute properly, and architects must be sold on the concept.