The authors of this blog have been pretty passionate for some years about Information Management and promoting the benefits of putting information and data at the center of an organizations development processes – Information Development.

To help promote this approach and to promote discussion and debate in the Information Management profession, we were behind an initiative to launch an open approach to Information Management – title MIKE2.0.

During the 1990’s the volume of raw data held by enterprises has grown exponentially.  All of that data had to be put to some use, and it has been both internally and externally.  As a result, non-ledger data has taken on greater and greater importance in the management, oversight and assessment of companies.  Unfortunately, the use of agreed processes and standards for the aggregation, measurement, quality and interpretation of the data has not moved at the same rate with every enterprise free use their own approaches.  In some cases this results in innocent ambiguity while in other cases organizations have taken the opportunity to deliberately mislead their stakeholders.

The complexity of data is not generally well understood.  Most often, it is assumed to be a set of static datasets which can be related to each other in an unambiguous way.  The reality is that data is constantly changing across the enterprise 24 hours a day.  With financial reporting, this constant change is generally well managed with ledger aggregation, group reporting and, most importantly, period-end closing.  By agreeing to specific cut-offs a point of reconciliation stabilizes all of this ongoing change.  Although it is taken for granted, the process followed to stabilise the data are non-trivial.

If non-ledger data is to be trusted to the same extent as financial data, then its complexity needs to be equally well managed in ways which are consistent across the industry.  No one consulting firm and no one financial institution can find the “right” answer unless the approach is much more widely adopted.  For this reason we have not only invested heavily in developing approaches to managing and measuring complex data, but have convinced our employer – BearingPoint – to donate it to the wider profession using a Creative Commons licensing model.

MIKE2.0 is that initiative and is larger than any one group of professionals.  It is managed by a mix of industry professionals across end-user and consulting firms.  It is designed as a multi-lingual collaboration that can link external reporting minimum standards with multiple internal data consolidation processes using a variety of technologies.  MIKE2.0 is one of the initiatives that Information Management professionals looking to shape their industry can embrace, influence and extend.

I am continually struck by the lack of formal valuation models to information. Considerng how much organizations spend on building and maintaining information assets and how valuable they are to the health of the business, you would think it would be an area that would receive more focus.

While I’ve seen a number of academic papers on assessing the Economic Value of Information, the practically implemented cases are few and far between.  I have done some development on “Assessment-oriented” models that can be value in formulating a strategy, such as the Economic Value of Information model in MIKE2.0.

An Information Value Assessment should provide a mechanism to assign an economic value to the information assets an organization holds and  the resulting impacts of Information Governance practices on this value.   It could also measure whether the return outweighs the cost and the time required to attain this return.

Governance models are just one way of assessing value.  Other simple techniques could include:

• Mastering - how many systems hold this common data?

• Latency - if I load this data into a warehouse in an hourly fashion as opposed to weekly what are the gains?
• Quality - RI issues, accuracy issues
• Reach - how many people read my blog?  who are the readers?

I think this is an area where industry models will greatly improve, similar to what has occurred in the past 10 years in the infrastructure space.  The lack of model points to the immaturity of information management as a competency and the strict building of information with technology.   I would welcome any other opinions on technqiues.