“It’s an unrealistic expectation for information to be right all the time”. Wow, that’s a statement, especially if coming from a high-level executive from a major information management company, namely Chris Livesey, IBM Information Management Director of UK, Ireland and South Africa, as heard at the Information on Demand conference last week in London. Is it really possible that the largest vendor of IM software and solutions is admitting that it can’t get information right? … yes and it’s probably a smart move. Information management is complex and its complexity increases with the size of the corporation. Large enterprises have a myriad of systems creating, storing, sharing and destroying information and all what Chris is saying is that it is unrealistic to think you can fix the issues in such a complex systems with a couple of IM projects or programme. And clients will thank and respenct him for this honesty…

Chris also went on to discuss what is on IBM’s IM agenda. It’s split in an “application agenda” and an “information agenda”, with the former including the good old SCM, CRM and ERP solutions and the latter the more recent and more innovative areas of customers profitability, dynamic supply chain, multi-channel marketing etc.

The expected revenue and growth for the respective areas highlight how IBM is carving up the market between these two agendas. And as usual, these would be important hints for the management and technology consultants, systems integrators and the likes on where to put their money.

IBM is delivering these solutions with “open standards and flexible architectures to enable Information on Demand” and presents (as expected) a formidable stack of software products to deliver this vision.

What suprised me was that there was no talk of collaboration, user interaction, knowledge sharing or even a word about Enterprise2.0?! IBM has an equally impressive product set for collaboration (Lotus Instant Messaging, Lotus Team Workplace, Lotus Notes, Lotus Quickr etc.). This should be included in their IM vision, not only for sales and monetary reason, but also for completeness of what IM can deliver to clients. Enterprise 2.0 and Collaboration and Communities of Interest are on MIKE2.0’s agenda.

What’s on your IM agenda?

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.

Organizations that focus on individual consumers often to struggle to identify their customers at the most basic level - their name. There are many reasons for this:

• Capture-dependent: spelling mistakes
• Customer-dependent: name changes
• Application-dependent: packing multiple fields into a single field
• Architecture-dependent: conflicting names for the same person across systems
  

These different types of issues then become increasingly difficult to address in a complex organization such as a retail bank or telco where dozens to hundreds of systems may hold customer records.

Collectively, Customer Data Integration (CDI) means doing all these things well and helps address what was a cause of failure on many Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementations. Vendors such as IBM, Syperion, Initiate and Oracle offer CDI-specific Solutions and the market is undergoing rapid growth.

Over the last few years there have been significant benefits to addressing these issues through better governance, data quality improvement programmes and upgrades to new applications that were more sophisticated in their capability to store customer data.

This involves fixing historical issues and minimizing the chance of errors occurring in the future.

One of the challenges that globalization brings is around name recognition. Techniques that have been applied over the past few years simply do not work as well with many Eastern European, North African, Middle Eastern and Asian names. The phonetic translations that convert Arabic names into a Western form are typically inconsistent.

Living in London, I see the Retail Banking sector facing perhaps the greatest complexity worldwide. Rapidly changing demographics require new techniques and technologies to solve this name recognition issue. Once again, big vendors are moving into this space through acquisition – with IBM offering a specific product – GNR – to meet the globalization name challenge.

One of the difficult aspects of Information Development is that organizations cannot “start over” – they need to fix the issues of the past. This means that the transition to a new model must incorporate a significant transition from the old world

Most organizations have a very poorly defined view of their current state information architecture: models are undefined, quality is unknown and ownership is unclear. A product that models the Enterprise Information Architecture and provides a path for transitioning to the future state would therefore be extremely valuable.

Its capabilities could be grouped into 2 categories:

Things that can be done today, but typically through multiple products

• Can be used to define data models and interface schemas
• Provides GUI-based transformation mapping such as XML schema mapping or O-R mapping
• Is able to profile data and content to identify accuracy, consistency or integrity issues in a once-off or ongoing fashion
• Takes the direct outputs of profiling and incorporates these into a set of transformation rules
• Helps identify data-dependent business rules and classifies rule metadata
• Has an import utility to bring in common standards

New capabilities typically not seen in products today

• An ability to assign value to information based on its economic value within an organization
• Provides an information requirements gathering capability that includes drill down and traceability mapping are available across requirements
• Provides a data mastering model that shows overlaps of information assets across the enterprise and rules for its propagation
• Provides an ownership model to assign individual responsibility for different areas of the information architecture (e.g. data stewards, data owners, CIO)
• Has a compliance feature that can be run to check adherence to regulations and recommended best practices
• Provides a collaborative capability for users to jointly work together for better Information Governace

In summary, this product would be like an advanced profiling tool, enterprise architecture modelling tool and planning, budgeting and forecasting tool in one. It would be a major advantage to organizations on their path to Information Development.

Today’s solutions for Active Metadata Integration and Model Driven Development seem to provide the starting point for this next generation product. Smaller software firms such as MetaMatrix provided some visionary ideas to begin to move organizations to model driven Information Development. The bi-directional metadata repositories provided by the major players such as IBM and Informatica area a big step in the right direction. There is, however, a significant opportunity for a product that can fill the gap that exists today.