Organizations typically suffer from a lack of standards around information management. They develop standards on their own although they may use external reference materials. The issue is that most of the standards are definitional, but not validation-based. That is, the standards may say how a data warehouse model should be developed or provide a policy about how reference data should be synchronized.

What is missing is the validation step against these standards. What would be valuable are validation tools that test areas such as complexity while the solution is being developed. When we have simple tools like those used for W3C Markup Validation Service it will be a big help in the industry.

Climate change is increasingly a mainstream issue. There is growing momentum to address the issue at a number of levels, in the corporate sector, with private citizens and within government.

There is, however, a real danger with the trend towards carbon neutrality that is analogous to the poor systems designs. As described by the United Nations, climate change is just 1 of the 36 areas of Sustainable Development. An Information Development approach can help:

• Understand the impacts of decisions and how they impact other areas of Sustainability (e.g. how a programme that helps reduce a retailer’s carbon footprint by stopping imports from Africa impacts other areas).

• Collaboratively develop standards and share lessons learned. This will be a major benefit as the transformation organizations must go through is so significant. This isn’t necessarily “trade secrets” but an open and transparent forum for them to share information.

• Collaborative Business Intelligence platform to make objective decisions. Decisions can be based on a historical evidence and make us of historical models. Policy analysis, researches and the public can share different forms of information as part of the process.

• Information Sharing across different organisations, involving operational and analytical information. Enablers include open and common standards, search and collaboration. Some information can be anynoymised while other content can seen by both parties.

• Collaboratively develop standards and share lessons learned. This will be a major benefit as the transformation organizations must go through is so significant. This isn’t necessarily “trade secrets” but an open and transparent forum for them to share information.

• Measure progress based on standard metrics. We need standards because when we don’t account for what we produce, we may get unexpected issues. Information Quality issues are analogous to the pollutants we see from poor sustainability design.

The Information Development approach to Sustainable Development can be applied to design the interaction points between the different areas. It also means the ability to make fact-based decisions, share information between systems and provide easy access to information from complex, federated sources.