Author Archives: Andre - Page 3

Information Management Context – Project Manager’s View

Posted by on November 19, 2011 No comments

Implementation of information management projects is quite complex in ever changing business environments. The success or failure of such initiatives is often determined by ability of the project manager to see the big picture. Quite often such projects fail because the team concentrates on technology, neglecting other aspects of the environment. Technology is obviously important, but is merely part of the whole picture. Information management projects do not exist in isolation. There are many factors that need to be taken into account during planning, but also later closely monitored during the execution. The project manager needs to be alert to any changes in the environment and be ready to adopt. Rushing ahead with a project that do not addresses business need anymore, is going to lead to disaster.

What are the key elements of the environment that need to be addressed? The answer depends on the organization itself, but usually it could be grouped into following classes:

  • Business goals, principles and trade specific practices

Direction of the business, where it is going to be in 3 to 5 years, has direct impact on definition of business needs. The information management projects need to anticipate the change that is going to occur, and make sure that delivered business systems will support these needs, and there will be flexibility to adopt these systems easily when new requirements appear. For example, when implementing taxonomy, the project manager needs to make sure that it is scalable, so the organization will not have to spend fortune to redesign the system.  Buying trade specific classification from a third party, might save time, but each organization is different so this will require customization. Ability to satisfy business needs will also impact current and future end user satisfaction.

  • Organizational structure, roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders

Since every organization is different, it is not possible to use a single cookie-cutter approach. Identification of key players early in the project, and keeping them engaged during delivery is critical to success of the project. Making sure that stakeholders understand their accountabilities and responsibilities not only while the project is active, but also in the future when the delivered systems are operational, will help with establishing proper governance and change management.

  • Technology

Technology quite often introduces constraints to the project due to existing legacy systems, or decisions that were made already to standardize on specific products. However the project manager needs to anticipate change in the future in other systems generating data or consuming information. It is important that the project works closely with enterprise architects and monitor closely any other projects that are on the roadmap already. Quite often such projects introduce unexpected surprises, heavily impacting the project success. Even upgrades to existing systems might introduce need for change.

  • Corporate structure

Corporate structure changes quite frequently. Although information management systems should be independent from such structure by building taxonomy based primarily on business processes, often the corporate divisions have some independence in selection of tools and implementation of systems. Information management projects have often enterprise-wide effect, so making sure that all the involved groups are brought to the table, is extremely important. This is going to save lot of time and money in the future, when organization will try to leverage ability to mine information and knowledge.

  • Information Management practices

Depending on maturity of the organization, there might or might not be processes and practices in place already. The project manager must be aware of them before and during implementation. Also, delivery of new system has a rippling effect on overall ability to grow in such maturity, impacting governance and change management.

 

In summary, project managers implementing information management projects need to be acutely aware of the complexities of the whole environment, not only focusing narrowly on deliverables. Ultimately success of the project is not only measured by being on time, within budget and scope, but primarily by acceptance and usage after the project is delivered.

Is SharePoint records management capability sufficient?

Posted by on November 10, 2011 No comments

TAB recently published results of a survey related to adoption of SharePoint.

What is not surprising, the adoption is constantly increasing. Of 730 organizations surveyed, 64% used SharePoint to some degree, from that however only 35% for records management. 55% of those who didn’t use SharePoint for RM, were considering using it in the future.

Of all of the organizations using SharePoint, 87% used it for file sharing, and 80% for document management. Only 26% however used it for integration of the metadata. I think one of the reasons might be that most of these installations were still done on SharePoint 2007, without improvements to metadata management that were introduced in 2010 version.

The surprising part however is that 55% of respondents were using, or considering using add-ons for records management rather than native features in SharePoint (Records Center or in-place records management in SharePoint 2010). Does it mean that users do not trust or find the out- of-the- box functionality insufficient? It would be interesting to find answer to this question.

Information Management Trends

Posted by on October 31, 2011 No comments

Recently, while doing some research, I found in my documents a reference to an old Gartner report on knowledge workers productivity and its relationship to search. This report was from 2002 and stated that knowledge workers spent between 30 to 40% of their time searching for information, and they were less than 50% successful in their efforts. According to Kathy Harris and Regina Casonato – employees got 50 to 70% of information from other people rather than from their search results.

This referred to both electronic and physical documents. Physical documents are usually better organized, electronic often become quickly an information dump. Since then, there were new tools adopted and ratio of electronic to paper documents increased. With wide adoption of tools like SharePoint, instant messages, wireless phone texting, Tweeter and so on, there was a dramatic increase in amount of information that is being created and transmitted. Are we better now with the information management that then? I don’t think so. Although the search capabilities increased, and we use more powerful processors, full content search is still not the answer. Are we capturing more contextual information to help with targeted search? The answer is mostly – no – after seeing multiple implementations of SharePoint. Implementation of SharePoint sites became often too easy, without proper thought put into development of information architecture and governance. Very soon such installations turn into an information junkyard.

So what was the cost of lost productivity then in 2002? Assuming that average fully loaded salary of knowledge worker was about $ 80,000 per year, 30% will come to about $ 24,000 – per worker. These costs are mind blowing, especially if we take into account the success rate of less than 50%. So this raises a question – could be used in ECM business cases to support financial benefits, without accountants rejecting them as purely soft benefits? I touched on this in my previous blog post, and Jason White suggested interesting concept of using Business Intelligence tools to identify these benefits. But how to do it before we have ECM tools in place?

This relates to today’s report from Gartner on top 10 tech trends for 2012. Here are few interesting highlights relevant to information management:

–          Average teenager sends over 4,762 text messages per month – I am sure that busy executives with their Blackberries send less than this but it still shows how quickly volume of information is increasing

–          Context aware computing, using information about end user’s or object’s environment to improve quality of interaction – metadata and information architecture come to mind immediately, and its importance will be constantly growing.

–          Internet of everything with pervasive computing linking information generating input points like cameras, sensors, microphones, image recognition and so on. This is not only about the information volume but also about the privacy.

–          Next generation analytics – improvement in processing power will shift the analytics from data centers to end user platforms, including mobile devices. It will empower the end users to do lot of analysis themselves.

So what this all shows? It seems that the problems from 10 years ago were still not resolved, and information management is still trying to catch-up with technology. The focus of information management will have to shift towards proactive development of agile taxonomies, automatic tools to capture and normalize metadata, facilitating targeted search, as well as making analytics tools simpler for end users. This hopefully will turn into increased knowledge worker’s productivity.

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.

Information Management Organization

Posted by on June 16, 2011 No comments

Developing of organizational model to drive and support information management within organization, is in my opinion – one of the most difficult tasks. There is no single answer. Every organization is different and the model adoption will depend on multiple factors, just to mention few:

  • Information management maturity within the organization
  • Existing management structure, its formality and depth
  • Culture within the organization
  • History of the organization, particularly failed attempts to provide structure  and governance around information
  • Size and geographical distribution
  • Available skills
  • Business and departmental goals
  • Political pressures and ambitions

Irrespective of selected model, key elements that need to exist – the executive sponsorship and good, committed stakeholder coalition representing most critical areas of the organization. This could be challenging but building this support is providing good foundation for any future initiatives.

For most of organizations that do not have information management in place, starting small is the best practice. Creation of information management working group is a good approach. Focused initially on identification of existing key problems, development of key guiding principles, definition of goals, objectives, roadmap and initial structure,  could be done with relatively small budget. Some of the key elements to support any future information management initiatives is – establishing of a governance, development of strategy, and initial framework for information architecture.  The outputs should strike right balance for the organization to allow enough flexibility to be creative and productive through collaboration, but at the same time protecting informational assets through initiatives like records management.

The model should position existing roles within the organization in the model: CIO, Director of Information Management, existing information management technology functions and so on,  but also define accountabilities and responsibilities for data –  establishing Data Stewards.

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.

What is Information Management

Posted by on June 6, 2011 No comments

It is interesting – if you ask five people what Information Management is – you will get 7 different definitions. Recently I was in a panel discussion on this subject. Here is my take on this.

Information management is kind of an esoteric term – data but view in a context. Information becomes an asset and as any other physical assets of a company, it has associated value that is linked to the age of the asset. As with any other type of asset the information depreciates over time. Because of its nature – you cannot touch it – most of the companies ignore managing the information in the same way as the typical assets. However – it has its own value and sometimes it is considerable. If for example organization spent 2 million dollars on developing a research or a GIS map, if the users cannot find it – it is a waste.  So adding monetary and time value to the information is critical and people responsible for information should define and communicate this. Information should be put under quality control and protected. Again – because of its nature these concepts are the same but implementation must be different. As with other assets – information has its own lifecycle. Another important aspect is that information should have associated accountability within organization.

There are few elements that information must be based on:

  • Governance – describing how information is managed
  • People – how people use and influence the information
  • Processes – how information flows and changes
  • Technology – supporting collaboration, storage, preservation and security
  • Organization – how information is organized

To address these, the organizations should build the supporting elements – starting from the most basic, to more sophisticated where information value is realized:

  • Fundamental – these must be in place first
    • Information Strategy
    • Information Architecture
    • Governance
  • Basic business
    • Enterprise Content Management – managing unstructured data
    • Enterprise Data Management – managing structured data
  • Business value realization
    • Business Intelligence
    • Search, discovery, delivery
    • Knowledge Management

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.