Information management is a program of work which requires strong business vision, guidance and governance. If these are not in place, good information management is hard and expensive and generally not doable without significant organisational pain. If these are in place, and are well-published throughout the organisation, there will be direct benefits to the organisational bottom line. In the private sector this can be directly converted to revenue and profits. In the public sector it is more apparent in cost-reduction, productivity improvements and more effective information delivery.
I am sure you have many examples of specific benefits. I will start off with a couple (not from the same organisation):
- Subject-area oriented data models published in a data pack to project teams reduced data modelling work on each project by a minimum of six weeks.
- Publication of end-to-end data lineage maps reduced the average time to evaluate a data delivery change request from 7 working days to 3 hours.
- Publication of business definitions linked to technical data fields reduced physical data base field duplication (i.e. multiple applications, same fields, and different names) by 32%. Also, reduced multiple gathering of the same data elements by 26% since everyone could find the central repository for key client data.
- Integration of data done well means later projects do not have to do that integration again – therefore, the next project can just use the data, saving the time of integration. However, be sure not to confuse consolidation with integration as the former only provides technical benefits, whereas the latter provides longer term business value (as discussed in this excellent article by Rob Armstrong Hills, Peaks and Valleys - Teradata Magazine June 2007
So the challenge is for you all out in the field to share with the rest of us where you have seen savings or improvements through better information management. You may not want to share those examples which lead to commercial advantage, but I know there are many of you who work in the public sector domain. For the sake of reducing all our taxes, you have the opportunity to show how we can use information management to improve the privacy, security, efficiency and productivity of information use in our public institutions.
Until next time….
