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  Any analysis which sits on the shelf is out-of-date before it is even printed.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.

There is huge interest from clients in enterprise search, with the focus being how to create useful applications that go beyond documents or web pages.  Increasingly, we’re seeing organizations that have invested in metadata for regulatory compliance discovering the value of this asset using search technologies and techniques.

The original web experience was intended to be click-based navigating via a number of hubs to any point in the internet, but the last five years has seen the majority of users move to a language-based approach starting with a site like Google or Yahoo.  The example I often use is the rain radar, often when setting out to a meeting in a city I’ll check to see if rain is coming.  In Melbourne I can navigate from the www.bom.gov.au website to the radar but it’s faster for me to type “Melbourne weather radar” into Google, with the added benefit that I can use the same interface when I’m in Auckland, Singapore, New York etc..

At work, users are still in the late 90’s relying on incomplete intranets and a poorly maintained web of links.  The problem is primarily access to the structured repositories and even more importantly access to the structures of those repositories (ie., the metadata.

In many cases, banks have been the early adopters of metadata repositories followed by insurers and then the very large government departments.  The main driver for these repositories has been compliance and (for banks) risk (Basel II).  These repositories are enormously rich in content, but extremely difficult to interface to the rest of the organization’s information.  Search can be the solution and I recommend the following three steps:

1. Interface to metadata repositories
In a bank, a user should be able to search for “Risk Weighted Asset” and find not only the relevant documents but also a list of the systems and databases that contain relevant data as well as appropriate controls, processes and business rules.  It isn’t difficult to build interfaces between structured metadata and the search tools.

2. Interface to master data
The next step is to build an interface that allows the user to type “Assets Walmart 2005″ and find, via the metadata, appropriate queries which can then be launched in a BI tool (eg., Business Objects or Cognos).  This is part of my view that search should be the kick-off point for all information analysis.  Again, this sounds difficult but really isn’t, you can use the metadata repository to define the dimensions of search and emulate hints (ie., “Did you mean xyz”) to help if the user is almost on target.

3. Better analysis of the quality of search
The search index increasingly becomes an asset in its own right.  Using the techniques in MIKE2.0, we can use do constant health checks on the usability and relevance of the search index itself.