Governance

This is a continuation of last month's post: What You Need to Know to End Information Chaos.

Business makes extensive use of taxonomy and metadata in a variety of scenarios including accounting, databases and inter/intra-net based applications to provide structure and organize information.  All this is normal and straightforward.  Chaos arises, however, when a business manager or executive asks questions that cut-across systems.  When, for example, they want to be able to integrate engineering data, customer-oriented product information, customer information, and customer service complaints to identify new product-lines and solution opportunities. 

To achieve the goal of visualizing a business problem by mining information repositories in a creative way to address complex issues involving multiple data repositories, taxonomies and metadata must be aligned to establish a comprehensive "single source of truth."  The concept of a single source of truth is the mantra in the drive to put Master Data Management (MDM) into practice.  However, the effort comes with certain practical and serious challenges.  The most significant being the fact that different and well-governed information systems have different semantics and different metadata standards.  Achieving semantic interoperability is a serious challenge, especially as business systems and network service architectures develop to meet organizational needs to adapt to a rapidly changing technology environment.

So what to do?  How do organizations find ways to capture, manage, and derive understanding from a wide range of sources including its internal expertise resources and the stream of information provided by social media channels?

In the first part of this article I defined governance and discussed some of the key elements in designing a governance plan. For many organizations, the plan to migrate to SharePoint 2010 will require at a minimum a refresh if not complete redesign of existing information architectures. The relative newness of the platform means this is an opportune time to define and carefully plan exactly what the information landscape needs to be. Migration in and of itself should not be seen strictly as a means to acquire new capability, but rather as a suitable time to (re)design and implement foundational information management structures out of the gate. 

I recently pulled out my yellowed copy of Michael Dertouzos’ 1995 What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives.  What I found interesting is how some of those predictions were spot on and some oddly naïve about just how much humans can change.

In “What Will Be” the term used to describe how people get their jobs done by leveraging various tools for managing documents and information was “Groupwork”.    Today, we simply use content management applications to get our jobs done.    See my recent blog, “This internet thing? It's gonna be BIG!” for more discussion on what will be, what is, and what is to come.

As I looked back over the last 15 years, I thought about the progress made in content management platforms; and the hype that accompanied each one.  “Now, we will we have an end to information chaos! We can control what goes where and enable easy access!”  Sadly, each new offering led to its own flavor of information chaos. 

So is SharePoint 2010 the platform that will solve the problem? Or, will we find that information chaos is migrated along with content?   It’s really up to you and your organization. The opportunity is there but don’t take it for granted.

As I talk to companies and other enterprises, I find that most fall into the same trap – they buy a tool, install it, roll it out and wait for their people to get more efficient and effective.  They wait… and wait… and…  Instead of things getting better, they actually can get worse. 

Why is this, I asked myself.   Here are the five things that came immediately to mind.

“Having the people,systems and governance in place to facilitate a cross channel view of marketing assets and customer experience is a critical challenge many organizations are facing”

Laura Keller, Strategist at MISI company 

Silos Revisited

In many organizations the responsibility for creating marketing assets is decentralized and siloed by channel. One group is working on email marketing, another on web commerce, others on social media and still other groups on more traditional print and broadcast. Without solid governance and systems to support a view across these channels, companies are missing a tremendous opportunity to: 

1. Re-use marketing assets
2. Realize value from cross channel synergies
3. Evaluate the consistency and quality of marketing assets

Testing and validating a taxonomy can go many ways.  With a little luck and some hard work, usually it goes pretty well, you watch users click through the structure, find the right terms, and you go home feeling like everything's in its right place.