Blogger: Lyn Robison
Data management is something that many people in IT leadership believe that they can afford to ignore. For those of us who know better, who realize that information – not technology and systems – is the product of an IT department, how do we make data management a non-discretionary part of the IT agenda?
One way is to find a burning bridge. Find something that the business leadership wants and that they cannot have unless data is managed properly. Compliance to regulations is a good example. Another example would be giving the business to ability to manage an important business asset through its entire lifecycle, because the silos in today’s IT environment always prevent any effective management of business assets through their entire lifecycle. MODS can help in this situation.
Business leadership is often unaware of any significant problems in data management because their staff thinks it is their job to put out the fire on the burning bridge before the smoke reaches the executive suite. Someone should let the executives know that their bridge prone to combustion and that their staff is spending lots of their time dowsing the flames without saying anything.
Another way to make data management a non-discretionary part of the IT agenda is to find a business crisis that data management solves. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The next time a crisis comes up, deliberately couple it with data management. You can rightly do this because data management is a vital part of the solution to most any business crisis. Some IT people will offer a technology solution, but the business (if they are smart) won’t buy it. Offer a data management solution that uses the enterprise’s existing information systems. The technology-centric IT people will be confused and won’t like your solution, but the businesspeople will love its ROI. This is the type of solution that MODS lets you implement.
One final suggestion for making data management mandatory is to make information quality part of the IT department’s metrics. Any IT department that measures itself on the quality and usefulness of the information that its systems deliver to businesspeople will find that data management is the only thing that makes the metrics move in the right direction.
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