One way to look at Information Services

In my last post I discussed the need to have a governing system for information management. I called the lack thereof: “Information Services Contract Failure”. I will now discuss one way to look at Information Services.

Enterprise Architecture, as broken-down by the TOGAF framework, looks at an organization as comprising of Business, Information Systems (Data and Applications) and Technology. When you look at the business from an information perspective, you have business processes, which require and result in information and applications which act as custodians to the business information. Now while business interaction defines the conditions for an Information Services contract, it does not imply that contract exist merely between two involved business parties. As you know, one piece of information is usually relevant to more than one user, and the same piece of information could be originated from multiple sources in various ways.
 

Managing an Information Service Contract focuses on the information. Not its sources. Not its users. The information itself as an asset. Obviously the value is measured through its usage, and its liability through its handling costs and associated risks of misuse. So what we are really saying here is that the management of information is owned by the business as a whole, and not by a single (unfortunate) department. One way to implement this is through a central Information Management business team, who looks after one or more types of information. It is not the only care taker of the information and it does not own the information. It simply takes accountability for safeguarding the information and hence needs to have authority to influence internal custodians of the information. This does not include any legal rights to decide how the information must be handled. They must coordinate, advise, provide monitoring and insights and they can help manage the flow and organization of the information – but that is it.
 

Now, like any other business area, a central Information Management team have their own technology support. These people must look after ALL the data hubs, warehouses, and reporting platforms of the organization. You may want to  p a u s e  here and think about what this really means in terms of the current structure of your technology organization.

You might think that with a central team that manages the “golden copy” of the information there are no trust issues. But, while it might be true that in this model information converges through one (logical) path, trust in information emanates not from the lack of ambiguity, but rather from the degree of appropriateness of the information for it designated use.

 

According to an article I recently read (“The Hidden Biases in Big Data”), you need to consider the completeness-accuracy of data. Some data gets excluded due to technical limitations in sourcing it. However, there is another consideration relating to accuracy and that is the inappropriate use of filters. While we would like to believe that people intend for information to remain objective, poor decisions, driven out of preconceptions and/or lack of skill – can easily lead to skewed information with significant business implications.
 

For example, if a beverages distributor assumes low profit margins in a particular region based on past sales and economic conditions, he may decide to ignore or adjust any higher than expected sales figures as they do not make sense and deemed as errors. This can easily affect the company negatively. Firstly in terms of puzzling financial reports, which will result with extra cash that remains unallocated. This might then be adjusted later as an accounting error, or adjusted to sales figures from another period. This can even affect the marketing team, who would deem their actually successful marketing strategy as a failure.
 

As much as information quality is in the eye of the user, so is its trustworthiness in the hands of its craftsmen.

What we have here is a failure to communicate

I have written before about the need for structure in order to be able to communicate effectively. This is rather common sense more than anything else. You need a system of information exchange which is understood by the involved parties in order for the communication to carry value. There is no value in two people talking on the phone, if one speaks only one language, and the other one only speaks another. There may be a tone to interpret, or some common / similar words, but that again is part of a common system of information exchange.

Now I use the term “system” for a specific reason. A system is a pattern of behavior with inputs and outputs. If you have an understanding of the system, you can predict, to a certain level of confidence, what the outcome will be given certain inputs. In the context of information exchange, you can predict the outcome of communicating a message, if you have sufficient knowledge of what information was requested, and how the information fits with the reason you are communicating. Generally your prediction is that the information is understood and used for specific and agreed reasons.

Now this is where things get more interesting. You probably chuckled reading “understood and used for specific and agreed reasons”. That is the fundamental assumption, and yet it could not be further from the truth. You assume people understand the measurement units, the abbreviations, and the set of classification you apply to data. Yet you know, at the same breath that there is likely to be misinterpretations, misrepresentations and a need to verify and correct some data manually.

That really should not be the case.

Information exchange is only as effective as the compliance to its governing system. The less people are educated in a language such as English, the less two people from different cultures will be able to communicate effectively even if they both speak English. How much time do you spend learning the basics of your primary language? Usually longer than your first 10 years of your life if not longer. So why are we surprised that communication breaks down so often? It is sometimes related to the channel and method, but more often than not – it is because of information service contract failure.

(To be continued...)