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CIO's do not talk about information | Register To Post |
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| Jurgens Pieterse | Posted on: 2008/2/6 1:44 |
Moderator   Joined: 2005/5/5 From: systemiclogic.com Posts: 156 |
CIO's do not talk about information I have had several interviews now, as part of my research into the topic of Corporate Information Management. I am very surprised that most CIO's so far shy away from the topic. I can talk to them about business strategies and Information technologies but not Information. Usually when I want to talk about information then I am referred to somebody reporting to the CIO. I get the message: "Talk to me about anything but information". In the whole business and IT alignment argument it seems to me that information awareness of the CIO is the weakest link. When we talk about Corporate Information Management and how we improve the information awareness of everybody in the company then the scenario become even worse. The CIO simply thinks it must be an HR manager's concern and the HR manager has no clue what information awareness means. Employees are simply not aware that information is an important asset to the business. I believe this is the responsibility of the CIO to ensure that there are programs in place to continually raise the awareness of the importance of information in a business. I acknowledge that the CIO can not do this in isolation. The Human Resources manager must collaborate and that is why Corporate Information Management becomes a key component of enabling the alignment between business and IT.
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| robert.redpath | Posted on: 2008/2/14 23:57 |
Quite a regular   Joined: 2006/11/28 From: SL Australia Posts: 23 |
Re: CIO's do not talk about information Your comments chime well with a book I am reading at the moment “Information First: Integrating Knowledge and Information Architecture for Business Advantage” by Roger Evernden and Elaine Evernden (Elsevier 2003). They argue that after people, physical resources and money that information has become the 4th resource.
They say much else besides but the following ten statements they provide to provoke discussion with senior executives are worth considering: 1) There is a clear and distinct vision of information as a corporate resource 2) There is an organisation unit responsible for information and knowledge that is distinct from the information technology function 3) There is a well defined strategy and action plan for improving the effectiveness of information use across the organisation 4) Information that is vital and necessary to make key decisions is always readily and easily available 5) All information is available in a consistent and integrated format 6) Management believes that there is considerable value to be gained from the organization’s use of information 7) Information management is seen as the responsibility of business people as well as the information technology functions 8) Information has a key role in all business processes 9) Financial approval is readily available for investment in the information infrastructure of the organisation (as opposed to technology investments) 10) Information is used to support innovation and creativity in product and service development, business processes and customer support One need only agree with some of these statements to understand that CIOs should be doing more than talking about information and if they are not even doing that there is a problem. |
| Jurgens Pieterse | Posted on: 2008/2/15 17:03 |
Moderator Joined: 2005/5/5 From: systemiclogic.com Posts: 156 |
A clear and distinct vision of Information as a corporate resource I like the ten points you extracted from the book. Lets stand still and discuss each point. What would such a vision look like? Part of the vision should include what information is the most valuable for the business. I was reminded at a conference last week that when we look at a vision we should not state the obvious but state a vision that will differentiate us from our competitors. It is not good enough to have a vision to have reliable data. As an example I have been involved with a short term insurance company who had a vision to increase the number of cars retrieved back from the police by improving vehicle registration numbers.
What are the characteristics of a good vision of information?
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| robert.redpath | Posted on: 2008/2/21 17:08 |
Quite a regular Joined: 2006/11/28 From: SL Australia Posts: 23 |
Re: A clear and distinct vision of Information as a corporate resource When a vision is articulated at a meta level I am not sure it needs to differentiate us from our competition, it is rather at point 10 (Information is used to support innovation and creativity…..) that we truly differentiate ourselves from the competition but our information vision must support this. Maybe this is just definition.
Your example of the insurance company is an interesting one. It highlights one aspect of the vision that is important; that is the need to engage externally. In your example the insurance company seeks to add information by changing the identification and consequent data collection approach. As another example, typically companies in certain segments seek industry sector information such as a computer games manufacturer who seeks market behaviour information and market share data from an agency such as GfK. The vision could then include a clause stating that additionally information is sourced and used externally where appropriate and in support of our goals. |
| martin.krsek | Posted on: 2008/2/28 4:09 |
Quite a regular Joined: 2003/1/13 From: SL Australia Posts: 32 |
Re: A clear and distinct vision of Information as a corporate resource This maybe one of those cases where the title does not match the role very well. Although we call them Chief Informaiton Officers - they (or their departments) are at most Data custodians. Whether this is correct or not, I think what you found in your research is a sad reflection of the lack of appreciation of the business value of information in the information economy.
I would suggest that information is a business resource, a business asset and should therefore be owned by the "business". I am not skirting the issue but information is owned (or bits of it) in every department. The HR guy owns the employee data, the sales & marketing guy owns the product proliferation and sales data. The operations guy owns the productivity information, and the finance guy owns the ledgers, financial statements. Do you get my drift? If you doubt, ask the HR director if you can get access to the employee database. As far as unstructured information is concerned, marketing will own market intelligence studies, the company secretary will own minutes of board meetings. The CIO at best is a custodian of the electronic versions of the information, perhaps its an indictment that he does not understand all the information in the company - as may be suspected from his title. Those with some foresight will employ Knowledge Managers to try and keep track of who has what and who needs what. |
| ben.clohesy | Posted on: 2008/3/3 22:12 |
Not too shy to talk   Joined: 2008/2/29 From: SL Australia Posts: 12 |
Re: A clear and distinct vision of Information as a corporate resource There's an additional consideration with regards to the level of abstraction that the information represents and the need to differentiate between information and data.
When the level of abstraction is correct, it allows the right information to be utilised at the right time. For example, if an architect is interested in gaining an understanding of the overal structure of an organisation, then they would be interested in viewing/understanding a relatively abstract view of a business (involving concepts like 'Customer', 'Account', etc.). If they were interested in representing this in, for example, an SOA then they might look at much more abstract concepts like 'Party' and 'Arrangement'. This is the point that the architects should be working to enable a consistent design for the organisation. Once the level of abstraction moves downwards you eventually hit the level of 'data' where acutal values are stored. This is the point at which the minions of the CIO might be interested if they're in a data warehouse. Of course, this in turn requires sophisticated models to ensure a secure and accurate set of traceability relationships between abstract information concepts and concrete data values. Cheers, BC |
| Jurgens Pieterse | Posted on: 2008/6/5 7:17 |
Moderator Joined: 2005/5/5 From: systemiclogic.com Posts: 156 |
Re: A clear and distinct vision of Information as a corporate resource I agree that the ownership of information should be within business. However that does not dismiss the CIO from having an in depth insight into how information is used in the organisation. The CIO has to take ownership of parts of the information life cycle of which distribution and manipulation of information is a major part of the CIO's domain of ownership. The CIO can not take this ownership role without having an in depth understanding of the value of the resource he is distributing. The CIO needs to be in discussion with business managers continuously in order to assess the business value of information. The distribution strategy for information should then be developed within consideration of the business value of that information.
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| ben.clohesy | Posted on: 2008/8/4 18:34 |
Not too shy to talk Joined: 2008/2/29 From: SL Australia Posts: 12 |
Re: A clear and distinct vision of Information as a corporate resource Yes, I agree that the CIO has ultimate accountability for the information in the organisation.
There is definitely a model which consists of business domain specific concepts each of which is related to a canonical information model (for which the CIO whould be accountable). This canonical information model can then be used as the (to steal a term from Alan Frye) a "Rosetta Stone" that is a key for understanding. This can then be also used as means of communication into "lower" level technology languages. Cheers, BC
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