A Natural Synergy Between MIKE2.0 and the Semantic Enterprise

A recent post, “‘Pay as You Benefit‘: A New Enterprise IT Strategy,” describes an incremental approach to new information development activities premised on low-risk, affordable deployment chunks. The strategy is based on MIKE2.0’s Semantic Enterprise composite solution offering, and is a natural expression of MIKE2.0’s incremental deployment methodology. The strategy is especially well suited to the areas of information and knowledge management and information integration.

The pivotal difference in the ‘Pay as You Benefit‘ strategy is a shift from a closed world to an open world approach. Not only does this shift negate past IT hurdles of completeness and comprehensiveness — which have raised the stakes for IT initiatives for decades and are arguably a root cause of many failed projects — but it also is more suitable for enterprises needing to integrate outside information. Open world approaches can also comfortably embrace closed world ones, while the inverse is not true.

See further the full posting on the AI3:::Adaptive Information blog, a new addition to this site’s blogroll.

There will be a face-to-face session on MIKE2.0 and its semantic enterprise offering at the upcoming Semantic Technology Conference 2010. This F2F session on MIKE2.0 will be at 4:45 PM – 5:45 PM on Thurs, June 24. The conference, which expects 1200 attendees or so, is in its sixth year and is being held at at the Hilton Union Square in downtown San Francisco on June 21-25, 2010.

I will be leading the session and offering a few introductory remarks and slides. After that, we are hoping for a lively discussion and Q&A session on MIKE2.0 and its applicability to information development projects. While the emphasis will be on the semantic enterprise, given the broad usefulness of MIKE2.0, all topics will be fair game!

If any MIKE2.0 aficionados or practitioners are in the area, please attend and contribute. And, if you just simply want to learn more and meet others using the methodology, please drop by and join in the discussion.

Hope to see you there!

While much of the discussion about information management centres on things that are new and exciting, it is easy to neglect some of the basic principles that the profession has learnt over the last decade.  Here are just five things that I think are among the most important to consider if your project is to be a success.

First, use a standard project plan.  MIKE2.0 has been available for some years now and provides a work breakdown structure which is comprehensive.  Such an approach allows you to involve contractors and multiple service providers without being locked into anyone’s proprietary method.

Second, use data models that have been published.  There are many of them around ranging from low cost publications by authors such as Len Silverston through to enterprise models provided by the major software vendors.  Even the most expensive model is typically much cheaper than the labour cost that it can save.

Third, borrow from Don Rumsfeld: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”  The data warehouse is trying to manage the complexity of the entire business.  You can’t possibly know everything and hence requirements analysis should focus on the fundamental principles of the organisation and those things that are hard to undo later.

Fourth, the foundation of tomorrow’s enterprise data warehouse is unlikely to be today’s tactical solution.  Avoid the temptation to make the first iteration self-funding, the organisation has to be prepared to make an investment otherwise there are always cheaper short term solutions.

Finally, ask yourself whether your organisation is really as unique as your stakeholders think it is.  One of the most common reasons given for the use of unusual architectures or data models that don’t borrow from published materials is that the business is unique.  Everyone is looking for a point of differentiation but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t adopt standards where possible.  It is unlikely that the use of an unusual data warehouse architecture is going to enable a store to sell more toothpaste.  That same store, might, however, gain a real edge by combining consumer and supplier data in a new and novel way building on existing approaches to modelling the data.

Well thought through online strategies can do so much more than deliver high quality web sites for internal and external users. They can dramatically improve some of your business fundamentals. There are few things more fundamental than the quality of your data.

When people think of data quality they often focus first on customer data. One of the best ways to ensure that customer data is right is to provide a way for your own customers to update their details online. On its own, this is an important capability, but to be really effective it needs to be linked to something that the customer regularly does on the web, such as reviewing their accounts, orders or other interactions with your organisation. Truly effective businesses make updating customer details part of every interaction and available to all stakeholders in the customer, effectively building a Facebook-like facility for their customers identifying relationships (friends), preferences and activities.

Apart from enhanced customer service, it is worth remembering that it is much harder to maintain a fraudulent identify when you are connected through multiple relationships and you have to maintain an exponential number of fronts.

Business data includes much more than just customer details. Online collaboration both inside and outside the enterprise can enhance almost all data in some way. One of the most common problems businesses face is maintaining an accurate understanding of the definition of complex business terminology. Every organisation develops their own language and expects staff, customers and business partners to understand it. Worse, few maintain a dictionary of this language.

Consider creating such a dictionary, with components that are visible internally, other parts to business partners and a relevant subset to the world in general. To really leverage the power of the web, make this dictionary readily updatable (even using a wiki). While open to misuse, it is unlikely that internal staff or business partners who are easily traced will deliberately abuse the privilege. Online communities have shown that complex topics attract genuinely interested contributors who can often provide a better explanation to their peers that you could hope to publish either from an insight or simple labour perspective.

Finally having learnt to use the web to better maintain customer data and your data dictionary, it rapidly becomes obvious that many datasets would be candidates to be open to a wider community for monitoring, comment or even enhancement. Consider lists of branches, community contacts and products. In the last case, suppliers sometimes make changes which flow through your supply chain without being updated in online catalogues.

If there is one thing we’ve learnt, the fear that we feel about opening our content up for collaboration is often disproportionate to the real risk of misuse. If you succumb to this fear without carefully considering what you are worried about, then you’ll miss out on the power that the crowd can bring to our business.

Readers interested in these concepts should read further about the intersection of Enterprise 2.0 and Information Management in MIKE2.0, in particular the MIKE2.0 Enterprise 2.0 Solution Offering.

As I described in my last post, the quantity of information being generated globally and within each of our organisations is absolutely overwhelming.  All good managers facing a large problem start by trying to break the task down into manageable pieces.  The question information managers face is what is the right starting point for breaking enterprise information into such manageable pieces.  I’ve seen organisations start with technology (structured database, records, documents, email, HTML etc.).  I’ve seen others start by the subject being covered (customer, finance, human resources, product etc.).

A better approach is to ask how the information is used by the business.  Over many years, I have come to the conclusion that there are four ways that information is used.

The first use is the measurement of performance from executive to operations (for example the Balanced Scorecard).  The second use is to navigate the organisation via location, product, staff, customer or other common concepts (for example Master Data or Dimensional Models).  The third is to describe the business in an abstract or atomic way (for example third normal form data models in the data warehouse or the Enterprise Content Management repository).  Finally, the fourth is the operational system data which sits in front of the customer or production-line process.

Readers who are interested in exploring these ideas further can read a more detailed article on the Four Layers of Information.

Richard Wray, writing recently in The Guardian, pointed out that the volume of data held is now estimated at 487 billion GB.  To put this in perspective he explained that in printed form this would form a pile that would stretch to Pluto 10 times over.  The really staggering statistic, however, was that if this data were printed then the stack would grow faster than NASA’s fastest rocket.  I haven’t checked the stats, but a quick back of the envelope calculation suggests he’s in the right order of magnitude.

What does this mean?  Apart from the staggering numbers, it tells us that the problem for organisations isn’t holding large amounts of information – they already do that.  Nor is the problem necessarily how to index that information – increasingly they have defined information standards to do that.  The real problem is its continual growth – very few taxonomies or models properly account for the rapid rate of growth.

MIKE2.0 hosts a new generation of Information Management techniques which are designed to deal less with the data you have now and more with the data that you are likely to gain in the future.   A great place to start is with the SAFE architecture.

The social profile component has been enhanced to store data in a structured fashion to link to information management capabilities.

You can now tag your experience and the experience of others and look at the skills within our community.

Thanks to (Xiping) Kevin – who did a fantastic job in extening our social networking capability!

One of the questions we’ve been getting lately with MIKE2.0 is … how do I help?   Its great to hear this as we could certainly use it!

We’ve listed some overall ways here and in this context, the areas where we could really use help include:

• Best practices information security
• Best practices in business intelligence
• Best practices in search
• Best practices in content management
• Success stories from a business perspective using IM
• Requirements templates, ROI models and product-specific best practices

These could be architecture patterns, lessons learned or product reviews.

The easiest way to contribute, however, is to add bookmarks or engage in forum discussions.  Bookmarks are a great way to add content from others sites and link it into the MIKE2.0 framework.

And of course we could always use development help with omCollab.

We’ll work on making this list more clear – any suggestions on how to do this best are welcome!

One thing we’ve noticed over the past 2 years is that we’re building a solid “read” and “user” community around MIKE2.0 but we don’t have nearly as many contributors.

Whereas this is a common struggle for many wiki communities, it is arguably even a bigger hurdle in MIKE2.0 due to the method based approach. 3 of the biggest reasons why contributions have been difficult are:

• The impression (which is somewhat true) that it is tough to write wiki articles for MIKE2.0 – it’s seen as being kind of like writing a white paper.
• The nature of how people come to the site. The majority of users arrive on MIKE2.0 via search. They came to the site looking for something, not to add something.
• It’s not clear how people should help. Although there are wiki redlinks and stubs, its not immediately obvious – especially if someone has very limited time.

So we’re aiming to get people used to writing a bit at a time and engaged in a manner that allows them to interact better in a transactional fashion (e.g. a simple question or forum post). From this approach, I think we’ll get better results in terms of people writing. You can participate in the forum here: http://mike2.openmethodology.org/forum/

We’ve also built a discussion group in linked in.  While there is some overlap in terms of the functionality of these discussions forums – there is definitely value in getting plugged into the 30M members in linked in. You can join this group here: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=936087.

We’ll also work on integrating this into our site better in the future.

Enjoy!