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.
