Information-Driven Business E-Book

Robert Hillard

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 367

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

Information doesn't just provide a window on the business, increasingly it is the business. The global economy is moving from products to services which are described almost entirely electronically. Even those businesses that are traditionally associated with making things are less concerned with managing the manufacturing process (which is largely outsourced) than they are with maintaining their intellectual property. Information-Driven Business helps you to understand this change and find the value in your data. Hillard explains techniques that organizations can use and how businesses can apply them immediately. For example, simple changes to the way data is described will let staff support their customers much more quickly; and two simple measures let executives know whether they will be able to use the content of a database before it is even built. This book provides the foundation on which analytical and data rich organizations can be created. Innovative and revealing, this book provides a robust description of Information Management theory and how you can pragmatically apply it to real business problems, with almost instant benefits. Information-Driven Business comprehensively tackles the challenge of managing information, starting with why information has become important and how it is encoded, through to how to measure its use.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 - Understanding the Information Economy

DID THE INTERNET CREATE THE INFORMATION ECONOMY?

ORIGINS OF ELECTRONIC DATA STORAGE

STOCKS AND FLOWS

BUSINESS DATA

CHANGING BUSINESS MODELS

INFORMATION SHARING VERSUS INFRASTRUCTURE SHARING

GOVERNING THE NEW BUSINESS

SUCCESS IN THE INFORMATION ECONOMY

NOTES

Chapter 2 - The Language of Information

STRUCTURED QUERY LANGUAGE

STATISTICS

XQUERY LANGUAGE

SPREADSHEETS

DOCUMENTS AND WEB PAGES

KNOWLEDGE, COMMUNICATIONS, AND INFORMATION THEORY

NOTES

Chapter 3 - Information Governance

INFORMATION CURRENCY

ECONOMIC VALUE OF DATA

GOALS OF INFORMATION GOVERNANCE

ORGANIZATIONAL MODELS

OWNERSHIP OF INFORMATION

STRATEGIC VALUE MODELS

REPACKAGING OF INFORMATION

LIFE CYCLE

NOTES

Chapter 4 - Describing Structured Data

NETWORKS AND GRAPHS

BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO GRAPHS

RELATIONAL MODELING

RELATIONAL CONCEPTS

CARDINALITY AND ENTITY-RELATIONSHIP DIAGRAMS

NORMALIZATION

IMPACT OF TIME AND DATE ON RELATIONAL MODELS

APPLYING GRAPH THEORY TO DATA MODELS

DIRECTED GRAPHS

NORMALIZED MODELS

NOTE

Chapter 5 - Small Worlds Business Measure of Data

SMALL WORLDS

MEASURING THE PROBLEM AND SOLUTION

ABSTRACTING INFORMATION AS A GRAPH

METRICS

INTERPRETING THE RESULTS

NAVIGATING THE INFORMATION GRAPH

INFORMATION RELATIONSHIPS QUICKLY GET COMPLEX

USING THE TECHNIQUE

NOTE

Chapter 6 - Measuring the Quantity of Information

DEFINITION OF INFORMATION

THERMAL ENTROPY

INFORMATION ENTROPY

ENTROPY VERSUS STORAGE

ENTERPRISE INFORMATION ENTROPY

DECISION ENTROPY

CONCLUSION AND APPLICATION

NOTES

Chapter 7 - Describing the Enterprise

SIZE OF THE UNDERTAKING

ENTERPRISE DATA MODELS ARE ALL OR NOTHING

THE DATA MODEL AS A PANACEA

METADATA

THE METADATA SOLUTION

MASTER DATA VERSUS METADATA

THE METADATA MODEL

XML TAXONOMIES

METADATA STANDARDS

COLLABORATIVE METADATA

METADATA TECHNOLOGY

DATA QUALITY METADATA

HISTORY

EXECUTIVE BUY-IN

NOTES

Chapter 8 - A Model for Computing Based on Information Search

FUNCTION-CENTRIC APPLICATIONS

AN INFORMATION-CENTRIC BUSINESS

ENTERPRISE SEARCH

SECURITY

METADATA SEARCH REPOSITORY

BUILDING THE EXTRACTS

THE RESULT

NOTE

Chapter 9 - Complexity, Chaos, and System Dynamics

EARLY INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

SIMPLE SPREADSHEETS

COMPLEXITY

CHAOS THEORY

WHY INFORMATION IS COMPLEX

EXTENDING A PROTOTYPE

SYSTEM DYNAMICS

DATA AS AN ALGORITHM

VIRTUAL MODELS AND INTEGRATION

CHAOS OR COMPLEXITY

NOTES

Chapter 10 - Comparing Data Warehouse Architectures

DATA WAREHOUSING

CONTRASTING THE INMON AND KIMBALL APPROACHES

QUANTITY IMPLICATIONS

USABILITY IMPLICATIONS

HISTORICAL DATA

SUMMARY

NOTES

Chapter 11 - Layered View of Information

INFORMATION LAYERS

ARE THEY REAL?

TURNING THE LAYERS INTO AN ARCHITECTURE

THE USER INTERFACE

SELLING THE ARCHITECTURE

Chapter 12 - Master Data Management

PUBLISH AND SUBSCRIBE

ABOUT TIME

GRANULARITY, TERMINOLOGY, AND HIERARCHIES

RULE1: CONSISTENT TERMINOLOGY

RULE2: EVERYONE OWNS THE HIERARCHIES

RULE3: CONSISTENT GRANULARITY

RECONCILING INCONSISTENCIES

SLOWLY CHANGING DIMENSIONS

CUSTOMER DATA INTEGRATION

EXTENDING THE METADATA MODEL

TECHNOLOGY

Chapter 13 - Information and Data Quality

SPREADSHEETS

REFERENCING

FIT FOR PURPOSE

MEASURING STRUCTURED DATA QUALITY

A SCORECARD

METADATA QUALITY

EXTENDED METADATA MODEL

NOTES

Chapter 14 - Security

CRYPTOGRAPHY

PUBLIC KEY CRYPTOGRAPHY

APPLYING PKI

PREDICTING THE UNPREDICTABLE

PROTECTING AN INDIVIDUAL’S RIGHT TO PRIVACY

SECURING THE CONTENT VERSUS SECURING THE REFERENCE

Chapter 15 - Opening Up to the Crowd

A TAXONOMY FOR THE FUTURE

POPULATING THE STAKEHOLDER ATTRIBUTES

REDUCING E-MAIL TRAFFIC WITHIN PROJECTS

MANAGING CUSTOMER E-MAIL

GENERAL E-MAIL

PREPARING FOR THE UNKNOWN

THIRD-PARTY DATA CHARTERS

INFORMATION IS DYNAMIC

POWER OF THE CROWD CAN IMPROVE YOUR DATA QUALITY

NOTE

Chapter 16 - Building Incremental Knowledge

BAYESIAN PROBABILITIES

INFORMATION FROM PROCESSES

THE MIT BEER GAME

HYPOTHESIS TESTING AND CONFIDENCE LEVELS

BUSINESS ACTIVITY MONITORING

NOTE

Chapter 17 - Enterprise Information Architecture

WEB SITE INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

EXTENDING THE INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

BUSINESS CONTEXT

USERS

CONTENT

TOP-DOWN/BOTTOM-UP

PRESENTATION FORMAT

PROJECT RESOURCING

INFORMATION TO SUPPORT DECISION MAKING

NOTES

Looking to the Future

About the Author

Index

Copyright © 2010 by Robert Hillard. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hillard, Robert, 1968-

Information-driven business : how to manage data and information for maximum advantage / Robert Hillard. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-62577-4 (cloth); ISBN 978-0-470-64943-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-0-470-64945-9 (ebk); ISBN 978-0-470-64946-6 (ebk)

1. Technological innovations—Management. 2. Information technology—Management. 3. Management information systems. 4. Industrial management. I. Title.

HD45.H45 2010

658.4’038-dc22

2010007798

To A, I, and M with love.

Preface

This book is aimed at anyone who is in any way responsible for information. Executives, managers, and technical staff all need to understand how to manage this most valuable resource.

I wrote this book based on the observation that the concept of information overload is permeating every business that I deal with. At the same time, the global economy is moving from products to services that are described almost entirely electronically. Even those businesses that are traditionally associated with making things are less concerned with the management of the manufacturing process (which is largely outsourced) than they are with the management of their intellectual property. Increasingly, information doesn’t provide a window on the business. It is the business.

It’s a simple equation. Intellectual property is tied up in the data on computers. If it is the subject of focused management, then greater value is extracted from that data. If the intellectual property is a significant proportion of the value of the business, then such a focused effort will have a dramatic effect on the value of the business as a whole. Such an effort will also make the organization much more enjoyable to work in with less time lost searching for information that should be readily available and less time sifting through irrelevant data that should never have hit the e-mail inbox.

As business has become more complex, techniques are appearing almost every day that seek to simplify the task of managing a large, multifaceted organization. Their quest is similar to a physicist looking for the single unifying equation that will define the universe. Any approach that recommends focusing on one part of the business must use a limited set of measures that aggregate complex data from across the enterprise. In providing a simple answer, detail and differentiation must be lost.

A simple set of metrics by itself is no longer enough to sum up the millions or billions of moving parts that define the enterprise. Perhaps, then, it is time to gain a better understanding of the role of information in business.

While large quantities of information have been with us for as long as humans have gathered in groups, it has taken on a whole new dynamic form. The quantity of data has grown dramatically since the cost of computer storage dropped as it did at the end of the twentieth century. The growth has taken business management by surprise and the techniques that we use have not been able to keep up.

With little differentiation in the bricks-and-mortar assets, business needs to enhance its service and differentiate using the informational resources at its disposal. The winners tailor their product to the needs of their markets. Successful leaders have a deep insight into the running of their business. Such an insight can come only from accurate information.

In almost every organization, one or more executives have been assigned accountability for information governance, quality, or records. Similarly, technologists are being asked to make sense of the mountains of data that exist in databases, file systems, and other repositories. This is a book about becoming an information-centric business and achieving significant benefits as a result.

Over many years, I have had the opportunity to work with hundreds of organizations in the private and government sectors. The issues that they face handling business information have a common theme of complexity. Questions that should be simple to answer take too long, reconciliations that should be exact aren’t, privacy that should be perfect isn’t, and security that should be tight is porous.

Treating information as something that needs to be managed in its own right allows a profession of information managers to develop a common approach to information management. Without common techniques, many organizations have been ad hoc in their approach. The most successful, though, have borrowed approaches from other disciplines and been part of the evolution of a form of professional consensus.

For that reason, I have been pleased over a number of years to be part of the leadership of the MIKE2.0 initiative. MIKE2.0 (Method for the Implementation of a Knowledge Enterprise) is an open collaboration of information management professionals from a variety of organizations seeking to develop a common approach. The content is entirely free under the Creative Commons licensing model. MIKE2.0 can be found at www.openmethodology.org.

I have applied the techniques in this book in some of the world’s largest companies and government departments. They have also been effectively adopted in midsized and even small businesses. As a field grows in sophistication, so the knowledge needed by practitioners also increases. This book provides sufficient detail to allow anyone who deals with information to identify the right approach to apply without trying to be a step-by-step guide. Armed with the knowledge within these pages, the reader can then adopt comprehensive methodologies like MIKE2.0 to develop detailed project plans or establish programs of work.

Each chapter introduces a concept and in many cases provides both strategic and tactical advice. The strategic advice will help shape the future enterprise. The tactical advice will help solve immediate challenges. The reader should be left with the overwhelming message that information management is not the responsibility of the information technology department, nor is it able to be governed by any one line of business. Information is an asset with a very real economic value. It is the responsibility of everyone who in any way creates, handles, stores, or exploits this asset to ensure that they achieve the greatest possible value for the enterprise as a whole.

This is not the final book that will be written on this subject. The discipline will continue to develop as we all find better and more effective ways to run organizations to better create, handle, and exploit information. There is no single answer to the question on how you should manage your information resources, so apart from the MIKE2.0 site, I also encourage readers of this book to check in at www.infodrivenbusiness.com where additional references and comments will be posted.

Acknowledgments

Many people have helped to review draft manuscripts, supported the process of getting it published, and constantly challenged me to think deeply about all aspects of information and data management. I’d like to specifically thank, in no particular order, Robin Hillard, Michelle Pearce, Professor David Arnott, Sean McClowry, Professor Graeme Shanks, Dr. Gregory Hill, Frank Farrall, Gerhard Vorster, Giam Swiegers, Brian Romer, and Michael Tarlinton.

Chapter 1

Understanding the Information Economy

Managing information has become as important to the enterprise as managing financial information has been to the accounting functions of a business. Information now pervades every aspect of an organization, including reporting, marketing, product development, and resource allocation. In the last twenty years, business reports to management and investors have become much more dependent on information derived from nonfinancial sources than ever before.

In fact, as the economy increasingly depends on information, the old assumptions about what is important have changed. The value that business saw in scale due to shared functions and infrastructure have been turned on their head by business process outsourcing (BPO), which is the outsourcing of a business function that might previously have been done within the organization. Examples include the processing of invoices, payroll, or even customer contact through call centers.

BPO is only possible because of advances in the storage, communication, and description of complex information at a cost that is much lower than imaginable even twenty years ago. At the same time, the value that business might previously have seen in owning infrastructure (such as manufacturing plants) has been overtaken by the value of the knowledge of the manufacturing process.