IT/IM implementations collectively cost organizations up to $6.2 trillion annually, an amount that increases anywhere from 10%-20% each year.  Yet many of these ventures fail to meet management expectations. 

Why is this? 

As a small business marketing manager, I have managed four CRM implementations and, having learned by experience, these are the main reasons they fail and how to avoid them:

Unclear management expectations.  It is important to involve management in the decision making process, be realistic about what the system can do, and to clearly communicate the benefits/limitations of the solution you are choosing.

Scope creep.  In the implementation process, management may find that the features of the system  are limited and may need additional services that were not previously budgeted.  This causes the project to drain resources more quickly and increases the chances of failure.  When determining the project schedule and allocation of resources, clearly communicate what the system will look like and what functionality it will have to avoid a creep in the scope. 

Costly add-ons. Software/system solution providers LOVE add-ons.  In many cases, the solution they’ve given you to test drive is not the base model, and to get the bells and whistles you’ve gotten used to, you will have to pay extra for them.  

Lack of technical support.  Third party systems are more cost effective but often notorious for poor technical support.  For over the phone service, you typically have to pay extra to receive a live person within a timely manner.  This causes frustration and further budget usage.  Prior to deciding on a solution, make sure to test the support during your trial period and ask ahead of time what type of support can be expected once you are a customer.

Lack of user adoption.  By not having a formal change management plan and training program, you are setting your employees (as well as the project) up for failure.  It is important to clearly communicate the benefits of the new system, train employees how to use it, and have an onsite, dedicated “go-to” person they can call on for help.

In your experience, is there more?  What advice can you offer that will help companies choose and implement their solutions wisely?

Debra Logan of Gartner makes some great points in her blog titled “How Can Information Governance Succeed?” Our natural tendency to focus on the short term and personal, versus the long term and societal is often the downfall of community and group ventures.   We simply forget the importance of handing off the torch before exiting the race. 

Have you seen any recent successes in Information Governance that can speak to the contrary?  What, in your experience, was the piece that kept it together?

Olga Maydanchik

Olga Maydanchik is an experienced consultant and practitioner in the field of data quality. Olga was involved in more than 20 large-scale data conversion, consolidation, and cleansing projects. Her clients include such household names as Kimberly-Clark, Sprint, and Verizon. Prior to starting Data Quality Group, Olga was a senior partner at Arkidata Corp.  She holds MS degrees from Moscow State University and Wayne State University.

All information, content, documents, etc have implicit and explicit context and metadata associated with them, therefore they you might say they are structured to a certain extent.   So is there even such a thing as unstructured content?

Steve is the Chief Strategy Officer for Datanomic. Steve has more than 20 years IT experience, 14 of which have been gained specifically in data quality management. During his career, Steve has improved data quality for organizations including BT, Thomas Cook, Credit Suisse, Norwich Union and the Inland Revenue.  Steve has also held a number of senior IT roles including manager of products and services at data management specialist Kognitio and Managing Director of Tranato, a specialist data quality consultancy acquired by Datanomic in 2006.

Steve is a Charter Member of the International Association of Information and Data Quality (IAIDQ – www.iaidq.org) and Secretary of its UK Community of Practice.

Connect with Steve.

As employees today have increasingly free reign to connect and share data online, the amount of untapped organizational knowledge grows in proportion.  The very nature of online communities allow us to create personas that enable us to say whatever we want, whenever we want, and to whomever we chose.  As our virtual freedom increases, it becomes more and more difficult to identify and make use of concrete, usable information that can help the business in a tangible, measurable way. 

According to Oliver Marks, Enterprise2.0 strategist and consultant, business collaboration should be about “facilitating communication, streamlining processes and providing valuable contextual information to coworkers, against which business value can be measured as increased efficiency and awareness.”

To achieve this end, it is necessary for IM professionals and online community managers to create an environment that promotes the exchange of information with a defined and measurable objective in mind.  Much like offline collaboration, the members of the online community must be working towards a common goal and have a framework in place to start from. 

MIKE2.0 (www.openmethodology.org) has a solid, open source framework that many enterprise experts could learn from.  The community itself offers not only the traditional benefits of profile building, networking, blog posting and bookmarking, but a common goal and methodology for reaching it. 

Have you seen other online communities employing the open methodology strategy?  What advice could you give community managers to improve upon and help create business value from their community?

John Platten

John Platten is the CEO and Principal Consultant of Vivamex Limited a data quality, data migration, data warehousing and data management consultancy. John has worked in IT for over 20 years and began building data warehouses around 1995 when the concept was relatively new. 

His clients have included T-Mobile, GlaxoSmithkline, BP, and Shell where he has led data quality, data warehouse and ERP migrations into SAP projects.