I recently participated in a podcast to talk about why I’m involved in MIKE2.0 and how information can be turned to a company’s advantage.  In summary, too many organizations are only looking at information from a defensive perspective with a focus on compliance.

Compliance in general, and for many organizations, Sarbanes-Oxley in particular, are topics that get a lot of management attention.  The core of the work is to define business processes and to identify control points.  When I look at the results from most companies, I see vast quantities of process documentation, often in Microsoft Visio, which has been printed into fat binders and placed on the shelf.  Compliance achieved!

You don’t need me to tell you about the benefits of living documents.  Any analysis which sits on the shelf is out-of-date before it is even printed.  There have been many discussions about engineering systems on the back of the process documentation, however few approaches have been truly successful as inevitably there is a separation of some kind between the applications to run the process and the documentation.

I, my colleagues, and most people involved in MIKE2.0 advocate a different approach.  Start by looking at the way you measure compliance, which is looking at the data which comes out of each control point.  If the data is complete then the navigation between control points is actually of much less consequence (different people do their jobs differently).

When we take this data-driven approach, we also find that a complete analysis of control points also generally shows that the most valuable information held by the company is general identified.  It should come as no surprise that controls provide a live feed of business crucial activities – Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)!  Now we can support multiple applications providing the same data, but doing it in different ways (often this corresponds to product systems) and we can free-up business units to find creative ways to achieve the best possible business outcome.

The key to doing this successfully is to take an Information Development approach.  If governance and business supervision focuses on the outcomes (measured through the control point data) rather than process steps then the company is generally more agile, able to integrate new business units more rapidly and is staffed by empowered executives.

I recently attended IBM’s Information On Demand conference in Las Vegas, including meeting with IBM’s Information Management CTO, Anant Jhingran.  Anant and IBM understand the necessity of separating the content away from the application, I suspect this is why they are happy to stay out of the application space and why they are so supportive of SOA, specialist XML vendors and other forms of open communities.

Two of these XML vendors that I find particularly interesting in this context, because of their support of this “ecosystem” style of approach, are JustSystems and CoreFiling.

JustSystems, who have perhaps been known in the past as a Japanese “office” software company, have made a major push in the XML space with products like xfy which allows organizations to build process flows and dynamic datasets without having to build the full system.  We find this attractive as it supports the Information Development approach of allowing prototyping focused on the content, then building a process, providing a content test platform and then (in production) providing a place to review content and manage content irrespective of the application that manages the process flow.

CoreFiling have been one of the early XBRL providers.  XBRL is the emerging business reporting XML standard and is gaining rapid acceptance (particularly with regulators, hence its attraction to organizations with significant compliance obligations).  CoreFiling provide products, such as SpiderMonkey which will supports the dynamic development of metadata (or taxonomies) across multiple applications and user groups, which is critical if the Information Development philosophy is to scale beyond small workgroups.