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.
