If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know my beliefs about how IT is starting to play an increased corporate-wide role in managing, protecting, optimizing and leveraging a corporation’s single most important asset: information.
I’m using the term “informationist” to reflect what IT is becoming; evolving beyond being a technologist, and towards understanding the corporate-wide issues regarding information management.
If you’ve missed the back story, I’d like to refer you here, here, and here – as a start.
This morning, I come across two articles that help paint the picture.
The first article can be found in Computerweekly, talking about a recent Accenture survey that states “middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information necessary to do their jobs, and when they do find it, it is often wrong”.
How true, how true. And there are other, more troubling, aspects of this discussion.
Why is this?
We have an unmet need that's clearly visible. We have technologies in place that can solve the problem. So what's up?
I think it’s a combination of forces that IT hasn’t really gotten their head around yet.
Soft vs. hard information
First, the type of information we care about has changed substantially. I remember a time when we all wanted to get directly at the database and run queries. That hasn’t been the case for quite a while.
Today, we (as middle management) are far more interested in summary reports, existing analysis, people’s interpretations of the results, in-process activities by various teams, current discussions around a topic, and so on.
I think of it as soft information, rather than hard information.
Workflows (and work) has changed
Second, I’ve noticed that the workflows we really care about have substantially changed. I think that’s because the nature of work has changed for many of us as well.
When I hear a vendor talk about workflow or BPM (business process management), they’re usually using an event-driven model: like signing up a customer, or procuring supplies, or something else that’s pretty linear.
Not to be too alarmist here, but anything that can be well documented can be outsourced or off-shored. And maybe should be.
What’s left? Collaborative workflows and collaborative BPM.
What I see today is knowledge workers working together around a common view of soft information. I see non-linear workflows that have more to do with discussion, evaluation and decisions – and less with event-driven transactional flows.
It seems to be less about data warehouses and business intelligence applications that summarize hard facts and events, and more about delivering tools that help people work the way they want to.
Given those two trends, has IT put in the infrastructure that can capitalize (or at least respond) to this shift?
The answer – outside of a few shining examples – is “no”
Broadly speaking, IT hasn’t invested in building and leveraging the repositories of soft information that are so valuable these days.
They haven’t invested in the classification and metadata management tools that can sift through piles of gorp and identify the useful nuggets.
They haven’t given their users collaborative BPM tools that reflect the new world of business activity in more developed nations.
They haven’t given them the foundation to build extremely useful capabilities like enterprise search, or non-linear workflows.
Maybe they’re thinking about these capabilities as IT projects funded by business units; and are missing the broader point that these capabilities are something that *every* business unit should be using – it should be funded as information infrastructure, and not some neat-and-tidy application.
Now, you’ve seen me talk about what Documentum does in these environments. And I’m not only a big fan of the platform, but what it represents as far as an evolution in IT thinking.
And I’ve written about why I think Office 2007 is such a big step forward, especially when you consider all the new functionality in SharePoint, and what EMC has done to extend this capability.
Which leads me to our second article.
After you look at the problem for a while, you’ll realize that you need a powerful set of tools that can make sense of unclassified, disorganized information and suss out the useful bits.
Once you’ve done that, you can feed an ECM environment such as Documentum with what you find, as well as lots of other useful things: save costs, protect appropriately, and so on.
I’ve talked about EMC’s Infoscape before as a key piece of the informationist puzzle; today the folks at Infoworld bestowed the 2007 Technology Of The Year award on this EMC product.
It’s always nice when you get some quasi-independent validation of your own thinking.
Another wonderful data point
I had a very positive customer experience a few weeks back.
I was presenting to the leader of a large insurance company. I was a few minutes into my usual rant: things are changing, IT has to act more like the CFO of information, and so on, we’re all becoming informationists, and so on.
The nice gentleman stopped me, and said that they were way beyond that phase.
They’d recognized that information was the single most important asset the company had; the corporation and IT had recognized this a while back, and – as a result – they had a well-developed information governance function, policies that covered who owned what aspect of information, IT architecture was reflecting information requirements rather than application requirements, and so on.
They knew that they had more work to do, but they felt they were moving in the right direction.
I was pleasantly stunned. I couldn’t agree more. I started grinning ear to ear.
They got it, and they’d done something about it. First time it happened to me. I hope it happens again and again.
The more we talk to people about SharePoint / Documentum integration, we’re hearing more and more notes being sounded around this need. I hope the trend continues.
Maybe there are more of you out there who recognize this important shift in IT. I’d like to hear your stories, just so I can gauge where the industry is on this important topic.
So, I’ll ask the question again – are you an informationist?
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