My experience is that many big, complex organizations need an approach based on Information Management Transformation – a radical change to how they manage their information that is referred to as Information Development in MIKE2.0. But transformation is hard and there is a need to show value quickly. I’ve seen agile development techniques work for Software Development; can they work for Information Development?

The idea behind Agile Information Development is to provide an approach to most quickly deliver Information Management engagements using the MIKE2.0 Methodology. Agile development processes can be difficult for information management engagements due to the complexity of historical issues. Agile Information Development makes use of the techniques in XBR, Continuous Implementation and Continuous Improvement and accelerates them further. These techniques are from strategy through to implementation.

To find out more, go to the Agile Information Development Solution Offering. It’s in the early stages, so please jump in and help out!

There are lots of great community sites for Information Management.  A question I’m often asked is “Why would I go to MIKE2.0?“, “What makes MIKE2.0 unique?”.   Below, I’ve tried to answer that question.

MIKE2.0 is a methodology for Enterprise Information Management. More than a traditional method, it’s really a complete framework: a common way of doing IM projects and logical best practices - linked into business issues and technology-specific solutions. Its scope covers the complete information supply chain within a company from how it is created, kept secure, accessed, presented, used for decisions, destroyed, etc.

As a community we haven’t quite figured out information management yet. The techniques are relatively immature and fragmented and the problems keep getting more complex. This is one of the reasons we see so many problems today in our clients. It is also why we see organizations that manage information well (Google, Walmart) being so successful.

I think our approach impacts the community in 3 significant ways:

By creating a standard for Information Development through a common competency. This is really what the community needs and due to the complexity of the issue, a complete framework is needed solve the problem. That’s our primary goal with MIKE2.0 and something no other consulting firms provides. We’re also using this approach as an organizing framework for open source technology.

Through the Integrated Content Repository, organizations create mashups to the MIKE2.0 standard and the best assets on the web. We call this approach Governance 2.0 and it’s a solution we can build for our clients.

As far as we know, MIKE2.0 is the world’s first open and collaborative methodology. It will be an interesting challenge for our community to see if we can actually build on this approach, which sits between a Wikipedia-style model and something you would see with code.

For a community standpoint, I think the approach is working. Every day we’re seeing more visitors to MIKE2.0 and getting positive feedback. We have a long way to go, but we’re getting there.

As you will have noticed (unless you are a new user), MIKE2.0 just received a major facelift. We have spent the last 6 weeks up until now introducing new, exciting functionality and a major improvement in the look at feel of the site. Here is a summary of the major changes:

• New integrated skin across the wiki, blogs and social bookmarking, enabling common navigation and common search

• Single sign on from your wiki account with bookmarks, so there is no need any more to log in twice
• Improved navigation menu on the MIKE2.0 wiki, giving you easy access to the key pages of the site

• New rating of bookmarks and commenting on bookmarks to bring out the bookmarks most valued by the IM community

• Social networking where you can share your social profile and connect with other practitioners and build the IM community
• Upgrade of blogs to Wordpress 2.5 with improved blog post management functionality

You will have also seen a new “Partners” feature box on the bottom left. We want to thank our supporters and would like to give them an opportunity to feature their site. If you are interested in becoming a supporter for MIKE2.0, please get in touch with the MIKE2.0 Leadership Team.

What’s in the works? We want to provide single sign on with the group blog so that you can comment without having to enter your name/email address every time. We are also looking to improve how we showcase some of our key contributors. And we would like to improve office integration and WYSIWYG editing functionality.

In the mean time, enjoy the new site, tell your colleagues about it or blog about it.

I also want to say a special thank you to the people who made this major facelift happen: Alex Papadopoulos, Aran Dunkley, Jarrod Poynton, Pete Dakin and Sean McClowry. Thanks for your hard work.

Yours,

Andreas Rindler

Solution Architect for MIKE2.0 Collaboration Platform

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.

The last 5 years have seen a rapid advancement in open source software development. The reason it works so well is that open source isn’t just about freely available code, it’s a different approach to developing software to can leverage a huge resource pool of available talent. In some cases, an open source product may be of higher quality than a commercially developed product.

Open Source Information Development
Open source content development is the other area that has exploded. Wikipedia is the best example of collaborative development of content where authors build upon the work of others to release a product that anyone can edit.

What about open source data? We’re starting to see it too. A great example is the OpenStreetMap project, where individuals are “mapping the world” by building a repository of geodata and point of interest overlay in a wiki. OpenStreetMap looks to form a credible competitor to the government geodata providers – with the costly ones in Europe providing a particularly attractive target. Some of the ideas about what it may achieve in the future are even more exciting.

Software Development vs. Information Development
When developing open source code or information there are many similarities. The biggest differences have to do with commit rights and release cycles. Whereas code is released in cycles, wikis tend to have content changing all the time. This provides maximum value in terms of encouraging contributions but results in instability.

The other issue is that of authorization to contribute. In a code model there are typically controls around commit rights and a test process to ensure the code developed matches the planned specification.

To get more open source Information Development, we think a hybrid model makes sense in some scenarios. This is what we’ve done with the open methodology framework in MIKE2.0 in an attempt to add stability and reliability. While there are certainly some downsides, we believe that in some cases it can provide the best model for development.

Where Else Might it Apply?
The best case for the approach seems to be related to the development of standards as a means for effective collaboration. I can imagine a few nightmare scenarios for open source information development related to personal privacy, but by looking at the geodata providers we may see other candidates - such as credit agencies - that will face competition through a variation of the open model.

The concept of a single version of the truth has gained currency in Information Management to the point of being a mantra and I believe it is appropriate to introduce a few words of caution.

If I can be philosophical for a moment, Information Management theory is starting to turn the many old views of the world, including the way physics describes objects.  This isn’t a long bow to draw for Information Management professionals: Imagine a white statue in the park.  If you put on rose colored glasses, what color is the statue?  If you get everyone in the park to put on rose colored glasses, what color is the statue?  If you cover the statue in rose colored cellophane?  If you paint in statue with rose colored paint?

Survey any group and you are likely to get different answers to the color of the statue under the different circumstances I’ve outlined here.  If you at least said that painting the statue changed its color then you are admitting that it is the information (in this case color) that you receive that is important rather than what might exist in any deeper layers.

Those same rose colored glasses can apply to the enterprise data warehouse.  One version of the truth that forces everyone to see the data through rose colored glasses does not make the data rose colored!  Accountants, however, have thought long and hard about this and have rules for how you can clean-up variances that can’t be reconciled.  The most important thing is to ensure that all observers agree rather than just observe the same result, and that includes reasonable outsiders, executives and analysts.

In the wake of a recent adverse court finding for a major media company in Australia, I was interviewed by The Age on the business dangers of email.  I argued that communication within and between companies should be embraced rather than feared, but proper governance inevitably meant that one-on-one emails were not the best way to manage this unstructured content.

You can read the full article at http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/teamwork-avoids-dangers-of-oneonone-emails/2007/09/09/1189276544211.html or listen the podcast at the same site.

In Small Worlds Data Transformation Measures, Rob wrote about the challenges of data modelling in today’s complex, federated enterprise. This is explained through an overview on Graph Theory, which provides the foundation for the relational modelling techniques first developed by Ted Cod over 30 years ago.

Relational Theory has been one of the stalwarts of software engineering. It is governed by a Codd’s rules, which have fundamentally stayed intact despite the rapid advances in other areas of software engineering – a testament to their effectiveness and simplicity.

While evolutions have taken place over time and there have been some variations to approach (e.g. dimensional modelling), the changes have built on the relational theory foundation and abided by its design principles.

But is it time for a change? Are some of the issues we are seeing today the result of the foundation starting to crumble due to complexity? Or is it that there are so many violations of Codd’s Rules? While the latter is certainly a contributing factor, it may be that relational theory is starting to wear under the weight of our modern systems infrastructures – and the issues will continue to get worse. Whereas there does not appear to be an equivalent approach to relational theory that will address the issues we see today, we think Small Worlds Theory and Web 2.0 may provide some ideas for a new approach.

Small Worlds Theory helps provide rationale for a different approach to modelling information. Small Worlds Theory tells us that for a complex system to be manageable it must be designed as an efficient network and that many systems (biological, social or technological) follow this approach. Although the information across organizations is highly federated, it does not inter-relate through an efficient network. As opposed to building a single enterprise data model, it is the services model that includes the modelling of “data in motion” that should be incopoporated into the comprehensive approach.

In addition to better modelling of federated data, new techniques should also to bring in unstructured content. This includes the information from the “informal network” such as that developed in wikis and blogs. While there are standards to add structure to unstructured content, their uptake has been slow. People prefer a quick and easy approach to classification, especially for content that is more informal in nature.

Therefore, the approach may involve the use of categories and taxonomies to bring together collaborative forms of communications and link it to the formal network. Both Andi Rindler and Jeremy Thomas have discussed some work we are doing in their area on the MIKE2.0 project on their blog posts. We’re also starting to see the implementation of some very cool ideas for dynamically bringing together tagging concepts such as the Tagline Generator.

In summary, whereas an approach based on a mathematical foundation is a required to provide a solution equivalent to Codd’s and there is a grand vision for a “semantic web”, we may chip away at the problem through a variety of techniques. Just as Search is already providing a common for mechanism for data access, other techniques may help with information federation and unstructured content.

If an organization is going to move towards a Center of Excellence model for Information Development, we are some asked: “does it makes sense for this to be done offshore?” This seems a logical question, as organizations are increasingly moving their delivery capabilities offshore, especially for large application development and systems integration projects.

Although we encourage organizations to think about Information Development as a competency analogous to application development, it isn’t just something you can give to a separate group – it is a cultural change that must go across the company. While expertise can certainly be brought in from the outside, it’s also a capability that must exist internally.

Offshore Information Development should incorporate the following principles:

1. It is the governance standards, policies and processes that enable an Information Development approach. These are the same in an offshore or onshore model.

2. An Information Development team can be a physical (i.e. a dedicated team) or a virtual (i.e. members have other significant roles). In most cases there is a combination of dedicated and shared resources.
   

3. For any sizeable offshore team, it will need to contain representation as part of the Information Development Center of Excellence.
   

4. Information Development crosses business boundaries and requires participation from senior execs to line staff. Therefore, it is not a delivery capability that can be built completely offshore.
   

5. The organizational model will evolve over time and individuals in assigned roles are typically needed to drive the transition to new organizational models.

In summary, organizations should make sure they have a strong onshore capability for Information Development, even if much of their development occurs offshore. Whatever the delivery model, the key to success is Information Governance through open and common standards, architectures and policies.