Enterprise Information Management Strategy Solution Offering

From MIKE2.0 Methodology

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This article is currently Under Construction. It is undergoing major changes as it is in the early stages of development. Users should help contribute to this article to get it to the point where is ready for a Peer Review.

This Solution Offering currently receives Major Coverage in the MIKE2.0 Methodology. Most required activities are provided through the Overall Implementation Guide and SAFE Architecture, but some Activities are still missing and there are only a few Supporting Assets. In summary, aspects of the Solution Offering can be used but it cannot be used as a whole.

Introduction

MIKE2.0 Solutions

Composite Solutions

Agile Information Development
Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise Information Management Strategy
Data Driven IT Transformation
Information Sharing
Governance 2.0
open-sustainability
Semantic Enterprise

The Enterprise Information Management Strategy Solution Offering provides an integrated strategy for all types of data and content across the orgnanisation. It effectively brings together the Enterprise Data Management and Enterprise Content Management Strategy Solution Offering Solution Offerings into a single offering. The offering provides recommendations related to contemporary data and content management technologies, revisions to organisational structures, necessary staff skill sets and governance process improvements needed for Enterprise Information Management. This is done through a Blueprinting/Roadmap-based approach that starts with a current-state assessment, uses architecture best practices and offers recommendations on how to implement the solution through an overall programme. Although it also includes more tactical options for delivery within the strategic framework, it is a solution offering that is focused on large-scale change in the organisation.

Executive Summary

Increasingly, organisations want to bring together their federated information assets. This applies to more than bringing data from key operational data into a data warehouse – it’s everything. It is generally not a physical approach (they still want the federated systems) but they do want to have a way to relate the different types of information assets together. Considering their complexity and fragmentation, for most organisations this is a monumental task.

This may be a grand vision but the need for this approach is readily apparent: why should a business user care if the information is stored in a document, a web page or a relational database – they just need to make decisions and they want them to be fact-based. What they don’t want is a different answer in 2 places – and its certainly something an auditor doesn’t want to see!

The good news is that technologies such as Search are making it easier to bring together the structured and unstructured worlds. The bad news is that the complexity of the problem keeps growing. This Solution Offering helps provide a strategy for managing all information assets in a holistic fashion.

Solution Offering Purpose

This is a Core Solution Offering. Core Solution Offerings bring together all assets in MIKE2.0 relevant to solving a specific business and technology problem. Many of these assets may already exist and as the suite is built out over time, assets can be progressively added to an Offering.

A Core Solution Offering contains all the elements required to define and deliver a go-to-market offering. It can use a combination of open, shared and private assets.

Solution Offering Relationship Overview

The MIKE2.0 Enterprise Information Management Strategy Solution Offering describes how the Activities and Supporting Assets of the MIKE2.0 Methodology can be applied to provide a strategy that includes all types of information across the organisation. The comprehensive approach goes across people, process, organisation and technology. This solution brings together many aspects of the overall MIKE2.0 Methodology and also makes recommendations on the use of external assets.

MIKE2.0 Solutions provide a detailed and holistic way of addressing specific problems. MIKE2.0 Solutions can be mapped directly to the Phase and Activities of the MIKE2.0 Overall Implementation Guide, providing additional content to help understand the overall approach.

The MIKE2.0 Overall Implementation Guide explains the relationships between the Phases, Activities and Tasks of the overall methodology as well as how the Supporting Assets tie to the overall Methodology and MIKE2.0 Solutions.

Users of the MIKE2.0 Methodology should always start with the Overall Implementation Guide and the MIKE2.0 Usage Model as a starting point for projects.

Solution Offering Definition

This Solution Offering can be used to help define an Enterprise Information Management Strategy. As a Composite Solution Offering, it brings together multiple Core Solution Offerings from the MIKE2.0 Methodology. This solution offering applies a top-down approach to defining an Enterprise Information Management strategy that can be used to:

Define a complete set of strategic business requirements required for Enterprise Information Management: goals, success factors, KPIs, knowledge drivers and the scope of content.

Assesses the current-state environment at the Enterprise level to determine current maturity levels of information and infrastructure.

Define a comprehensive governance model that include standards and policies for structured, semi-structured and unstructured content. Information Governance is the key to providing a common approach in a highly federated environment.

Define the strategic conceptual architecture for Enterprise Information Management that includes components requirements and high solution architecture options. These architecture options include specific options for integrating structured data and unstructured content.

Define a strategic logical architecture and gap analysis of the required capabilities against the current state.

Provides technology product recommendations against the required set of capabilities.

Defines an overall business case, programme plan and recommended project increments for implementation.

Through this approach, an overall Enterprise Information Management Strategy can be defined. This approach can then be delivered through more detailed workstreams that align with MIKE2.0 Solution Offerings.

Relationship to Solution Capabilities

The MIKE2.0 Solution Offering for an Enterprise Information Management Strategy is focused on Information Development. It uses a number of activities from the Overall Implementation Guide to define a comprehensive Information Management strategy.

Relationship to Enterprise Views

This solution is primarily about enabling Information Development for structured content stored in databases and unstructured content such as documents, images and web-based content. It provides a top-down, strategic approach to this problem that goes across people, process, organisational structure and technology.

Mapping to the Information Governance Framework

The Information Governance Solution Offering is required across all Solution Offerings. For this offering it is particularly important that the governance models focus on process, standards, architecture and moving to an organisational structure that is optimised for Information Development. The governance scope covers structured data and unstructured content. Standards and policies to provide some level of integration between all types of enterprise information are also part of this offering.

Mapping to the SAFE Architecture Framework

The Blueprinting approach to an Enterprise Information Management strategy typically defines that many (if not all) of the components from the SAFE Architecture will be required in the future-state. Infrastructure-oriented capabilities include those related such as platforms, security, connectivity and integration. In the area of more traditional structured data management, components include those related to data profiling, re-engineering and modelling.

It is important that these foundation capabilities be in place first, before more sophisticated capabilities such as Services Oriented Architectures. Enabling Technologies are used to smooth the transition to the most advanced techniques. Enterprise Business Management capabilities and those for Business Intelligence are also featured in a comprehensive approach to Information Management.

In order to cover unstructured aspects of Information Management, all components within Enterprise Content Management are also relevant to this offering. The SAFE Architecture is currently being extended to provide more detail in these areas.

There is growing convergence in management of different types of information. Whereas metadata management applies to all types of information assets and the concepts are the same, the terminology is typically different depending on the type of asset. Search is particularly important for its ability to bridge structured and unstructured content.

Mapping to the Overall Implementation Guide

In summary, all activities are required from the first two phases of the Overall Implementation Guide as part of a top-down approach to Enterprise Information Management Strategy.

Phase 1 - Business Assessment and Strategy Definition Blueprint

For a comprehensive, top-down programme all activities are required from this phase to define the overall Business Strategy. A description of how some of the key activities are applied is described below.

Enterprise Information Awareness

The Enterprise Information Management Awareness is an important activity to introduce key concepts so that the audience can have some level of common understanding. Enterprise Information Management is an area that has undergone significant technology changes over the past few years and users typically benefit from education on new concepts such as:

Comprehensive Data Quality management
Metadata-driven integration
Dealing with large volumes
Community-based content development
Document Management
Information Security
Web-based collaboration

It is also important to make sure to cover the foundational aspects of information management if the audience requires it.

Overall Business Strategy for Overall Information Development

The Overall Business Strategy for Information Development is used to define the strategic information requirements for the programme and is therefore one of the key activities of this solution offering.

Information Requirements gathered within this activity include:

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for Analytics and Reporting.
In-scope data areas for migration. This is kept at a fairly high level and individual data elements need not be defined at this stage.
From a collaboration and knowledge management perspective, this activity also defines the scope of information to be shared and jointly developed, as well as the ultimate knowledge goals for the organisation.

A comprehensive Information Management strategy covers a broad range of information which will be captured using varying forms of rigor. At this state it may be helpful to draw the boundaries and relationships for information that will be developed through more formal networks vs. those that are more informal.

It should be noted that this activity is very much at the strategic level. Detailed requirements are defined within Phase 3 and it will typically be re-visited as part of a part of specific solution’s strategy (e.g. when doing the strategy for a large Data Warehouse implementation following the strategy at the enterprise level).

Organisational QuickScan for Information Development

The Organisational QuickScan for Information Development provides an initial assessment of key applications, information processes and organisational capabilities in related to Information Management. It identifies issues in the current-state as well as providing an initial assessment of an organisation’s maturity in relation to information management.

The Organisational Quickscan an important activity for this offering as it helps to identify capability gaps at an Enterprise level.

Where the Information Maturity QuickScan assessment effectively covers many areas of Data Management, it is being extended to better cover the advanced architectural concepts related to document management, collaboration and information sharing.

Future State Vision for Information Management

The Future State Vision for Information Management defines the strategic conceptual architecture for Enterprise Information Management. As part of this activity best practices are introduced from a technology perspective as well as the resulting benefits to comparable organisations.

The strategic component level of the architecture lists the capabilities that will be provided throughout the course of the implementation to meet the strategic information requirements. High level solution architecture options should how these component capabilities can be brought together to solve a number of problems. For Enterprise Information Management a number of architectural options will be shown such as migration options, information analytics and collaboration; critical to this solution offering will be to show where aligning different implementation workstreams will introduce efficiencies in the approach, e.g. aligning a Data Migration and Data Warehousing effort so that only one interface needs to be built from source systems. The conceptual architecture defined within this activity then becomes the guiding framework for all solutions that follow.

Information Governance Organisation

An Initial Information Governance Organisation should be defined as part of the Enterprise Information Management strategy, using the existing organisational model as a baseline. Some organisations now have some form of Information Governance group, (especially related to Data Governance) but it is often at a project level. As part of this activity, an approach is defined to move toward a target organisation that is optimised for Information Development that:

Accomodates the horizontal flow of information across the organisation and therefore crosses project and departmental boundaries
Includes membership from senior stakeholders that take ownership in information at an enterprise level
Covers all forms of information, including unstructured content

This model may be implemented onshore or offshore, in a virtual, distributed or centralised fashion.

Return on Investment of Information Assets

Being able to measure the Return on Investment of Information Assets is an important part of defining the Enterprise Information Management Strategy. In this activity, the organisation will define its expected investment and corresponding return over the life of the programme. It should be noted the investment models as they relate to information management are immature, so there will be some difficulty in successfully making these measurements.

Phase 2 - Technology Assessment and Selection Blueprint

For a comprehensive, top-down programme all activities are required from this phase to define the overall Technology Strategy. A description of how some of the key activities are applied is described below.

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Strategic Requirements for Technology Backplane Development

Enterprise Information Management technologies reside along the Technology Backplane of Information Development and Infrastructure Development. This activity is used to define the capabilities that are needed for the strategic implementation of the programme. The initial strategic business requirements feed into this activity, as does the output from the conceptual architecture.

Strategic Non-Functional Requirements

In this activity, Strategic Non-Functional Requirements for Enterprise Information Management are captured at the strategic level. This activity defines requirements related to usability, performance and ability to scale to meet future business volume growth requirements. Due to the scope of this activity and the lifetime it should cover, measurements can be difficult to attain. The best guidance is to use the current state as a baseline and make measurements using an quantitative sizing model that can be tuned in the future. It is important to consider that the emerging requirements to stored certain types of information assets (e.g. media files or additional storage for regulatory requirements) can significantly impact prior models. These requirements should be kept at the strategic level – their main purpose is to be used as input to standards and policies and technology selection.

Current-State Logical Architecture

The Current-State Logical Architecture assesses the current capabilities in the environment for Enterprise Information Management. It specifically looks to what technologies can be re-used and the scope of any content that should be migrated into the future environment. The goal of the current-state assessment should not be the detailed documentation of the complete environment, but to make this assessment at the level of detail required to make decisions about how it can be applied in the future-state. Wherever possible, existing current-state artifacts should be leveraged but may need to be reviewed for validity.

Future-State Logical Architecture and Gap Analysis

The Future-State Logical Architecture and Gap Analysis builds on the Conceptual architecture that is already defined and takes it to the level of detail required to make strategic technology decisions. Within this activity a gap analysis is also conducted between the current-state and future-state to determine which technologies can be re-used and the existing information assets to be migrated to the new environment.

Future-State Physical Architecture and Vendor Selection

Through defining the Future-State Physical Architecture and Vendor Selection, logical capabilities are mapped to specific product options. This mapping is then used to make technology decisions, often through an RFP-based selection process.

Information Governance Policies

Information Governance Policies should be defined as part the Enterprise Information Management strategy. Policy requirements should first be collected before being translated into a specific set of policies that can be applied across the organisation. These high-level polices are then used to drive lower-level standards.

Information Standards

Standards Policies should be defined as part of a comprehensive approach to an Enterprise Information Management Strategy. Standards will cover areas such as:

Data Specification
Data Modelling
Content Modelling
Data Capture
Data Security
Data Reporting
Data Integration
Search

These standards are defined at a level that can be applied to all projects. Individual projects may then add to these standards in the future but their approach is encapsulated within the overall approach. Standards, policies and procedures are reviewed as part of a programme of Continuous Improvement.

Metadata Driven Architecture

XXX The strategy, design and implementation of a Metadata Driven Architecture is a key part of the approach to improving software development efficiency and information quality. The metadata management architecture and supporting development practices are a critical aspect of MIKE2.0, evidenced by the metadata architecture overlay that goes across all components in the SAFE architecture.

For this Solution Offering, the metadata architecture covers the taxonomies of unstructured content as well as the models that apply to relational data.

Some enhancements are being made to this activity so that it better covers unstructured content and the single activity can cover all types of information.

Technology Blueprint Completion

In the Technology Blueprint Completion activity, the final steps are added to the Technology Blueprint and the overall set of deliverables is brought together. This deliverable then describes the high level sequence of delivery points necessary to move to the vision for Enterprise Information Management through a set of project increments.

Mapping to Supporting Assets

Logical Architecture, Design and Development Best Practices

Product-Specific Implementation Techniques

Product Selection Criteria

Relationships to other Solution Offerings

Extending the Open Methodology through Solution Offerings