As a follow up to my question in post 1, on whether a lack of business involvement results in information being managed for information’s sake, I was drawn to a slide prepared by Gartner, which discusses how to determine the scope of Information Architecture governance in the organization. Assuming that we’re living in a perfect world and that the business is involved in the scope creation, this list seems like a perfect conversation starter.
It seems that once the scope is identified, the prioritization process would then be initiated. Paraphrasing Gartner, priorities should focus on the right information, with the right characteristics, the right interfaces, the right roles, and the right practices, providing the organization with the information that’s of the highest business value.
Sources:
Gartner for IT Leaders: How to Develop an Enterprise Information Architecture. (n.d.).
Scenario Toolkit: How to Develop a Big Data Strategy Using Outcome-Driven Enterprise Architecture. (2012, August 27).
“Defining the scope” is exactly the problem we are having at my current company. We went ahead and picked an MDM solution, but we have yet to decide what our master data actually is. More generally, we have created a data hub and a data governance group, but there is no indication yet of the importance to the business of any particular data entity. I’m optimistic, however, that the MDM project will give us the opportunity to start to make that decision, and we can continue that practice into the larger body of data we have available to us.
When we help our customers with Enterprise Information Management those are the steps we follow:
– Enterprise Data Strategy
– Define the direction to take in an integrated vision of Information Management
-Enterprise Data Policy
– Define enterprise data
– Describe the scope and concepts for enterprise data
– Determine implementation issues
Defining scope and prioritization are very critical steps that need to be followed. Our challenges often are Lack of cross – COI governance, vocabularies must be “normalized”, and collaboration is “encouraged”, but not enforced.