5 Keys to Managing Information as an Asset: The Ultimate Governance Challenge
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If you're reading this, then you likely already know that information is as important an asset to your organization as its bank accounts, customer lists, and office chairs. But having this knowledge is but the first step – next, you must get your organization to actually behave as if this were true! This is no easy task, in no small part because a great many managers and senior executives still don’t realize they have to handle their information at least as protectively as they do their wallets. And for sure, most end users don’t think about it much at all. This presentation helps you take your internal conversations about protecting, connecting, and sharing your business data, documents, images, and other content types to a more strategic level, one in which your bits of intellectual property are respected as the business-critical resources they are.
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5 Keys to Managing Information as an Asset: The Ultimate Governance Challenge
- 1. Steve Weissman Holly Group 5 Keys to Managing Information as an Asset The Ultimate Governance Challenge The Info Gov Guy!
- 3. What’s Information? Customer lists Financial reports Contracts Payables/receivables Emails + attachments Correspondence Market intelligence Staff experiences
- 4. What’s Information? Customer lists Financial reports Contracts Payables/receivables Emails + attachments Correspondence Market intelligence Staff experiences
- 6. What’s an Asset? Computers and cubicles Office desks and chairs Bank accounts Intellectual property Best practices Image: www.brandyoubrilliant.com
- 7. What is ‘Information as an Asset’? Knowledge or facts that are valuable to and owned by you
- 8. What is ‘Information as an Asset’? Knowledge or facts that are valuable to and owned by you Image: www.icmc2008.net
- 9. Elements of Information Value © Holly Group All Rights Reserved.
- 10. Elements of Information Value © Holly Group All Rights Reserved.
- 11. Elements of Information Value Missing or poor data? - No utility. © Holly Group All Rights Reserved.
- 12. Elements of Information Value Missing or poor data? - No utility. Missing or wrong context? - Not meaningful © Holly Group All Rights Reserved.
- 13. Elements of Information Value Missing or poor data? - No utility. Missing or wrong context? - Not meaningful Mismatched formats? - Not shareable. © Holly Group All Rights Reserved.
- 14. Elements of Information Value Missing or poor data? - No utility. Missing or wrong context? - Not meaningful © Holly Group All Rights Reserved. Mismatched formats? - Not shareable. Improper medium? - Not receivable
- 15. Elements of Information Value Decisions regarding one strand affect all the others. © Holly Group All Rights Reserved.
- 16. Elements of Information Value Decisions regarding one strand affect all the others. They all therefore must be continually well orchestrated in order to maximize value! © Holly Group All Rights Reserved.
- 17. To Know ≠ To Do The doing is the hard part!
- 18. Action Plan 1. Make a commitment 2. Be holistic 3. Assess risks 4. Contemplate metrics 5. Develop policies Image: www.kent.ac.uk
- 19. 1. Make a Commitment From the boardroom to the mailroom
- 20. 1. Make a Commitment From the boardroom to the mailroom Easier said than done
- 21. 2. Be Holistic Inventory everything
- 22. 2. Be Holistic Inventory everything – including your processes
- 23. 2. Be Holistic Include hard and soft copy information
- 24. 2. Be Holistic Encompass data, documents, infrastructure, and humans!
- 25. 3. Assess Risks Missed opportunities as well as FUD* * Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
- 26. 3. Assess Risks Opportunity to derive Maximum Total Value® © Holly Group All Rights Reserved.
- 27. 3. Assess Risks Opportunity to address vulnerabilities
- 28. 4. Contemplate Metrics “You can’t improve what you don’t measure”
- 29. 4. Contemplate Metrics Instances of unauthorized access: attempts and successes Number of exceptions to be handled Time spent finding needed information Incomplete/overly long search results
- 30. 4. Contemplate Metrics Be practical when setting goals 10 seconds to return meaningful search results may be OK if it’s 25 seconds (or impossible!) today
- 31. 5. Develop Policies Don’t have one? Get one!
- 32. 5. Develop Policies Be inclusive in their development
- 33. 5. Develop Policies Be sure to encompass: Information security, ownership, and usage Procedures for propagating concept of information as an asset Processes for enforcing compliance
- 34. In Other Words: It’s Governance!
- 35. In Other Words: It’s Governance!
- 36. Thank You! Yours free for attending today: Governance Guide to Information as an Asset http://bit.ly/infoasset
- 37. Steve Weissman Minister of Process & Information Betterment Holly Group ––––– 617-383-4655 @steveweissman sweissman@hollygroup.com www.hollygroup.com The Info Gov Guy! Member, AIIM Company of Fellows President, AIIM New England Chapter Governance Guide to Information as an Asset - http://bit.ly/infoasset - CERTIFIED INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Editor's Notes
- Image: http://www.brandyoubrilliant.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Icon_Asset_Inventory_Management.jpg
- Image: http://www.icmc2008.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/bring-value.jpg
- Having all this knowledge now is but the first step – next, you must get your organization to actually behave accordingly! This is no easy task, in no small part because a great many managers and senior executives still don’t realize they have to handle their information at least as protectively as they do their wallets. And for sure, most end users don’t think about it much at all.
- Image: http://www.kent.ac.uk/careers/sk/skillsactionplanning.htm
- To maximize the likelihood of success, the process must begin with the doubling-down by senior management on the belief that the company’s information is as vital to its performance as its other assets (people, money, infrastructure, etc.). While others in the organization may share this belief, the notion won’t propagate unless and until the higher-ups get behind it in a meaningful way – such as by making public, forceful, and continual statements of support and seriousness so everybody knows that the days of disorderly shared foldering, casual filesharing, ad hoc retention, etc. are over.
- The challenge here is that we use information every day and usually don’t give it a second thought. Ironically, it is this very pervasiveness that makes it invisible – much as water is to a fish. But this invisibility doesn’t make it any less vital to the day to day, and taking it for granted can be dangerous because of how vulnerable we are to issues affecting access, quality, and business continuity. Most users don’t stop to consider the broader ramifications of a more casual approach to managing information – it is, after all, how they are used to working, and they don’t think twice when they have to track stuff down, or check it for accuracy, or otherwise spend time working around it before they can do something with it. So a big part of this involves the discipline known as Change Management, which I’ve found surfaces earlier and earlier in each project I work on.
- The first tactical job on the list is to identify and classify just what information you have, who uses it and under what circumstances (internally and externally), what policies and regulations – internal, industry, and legislative – its handling needs to comply with, etc. The result of this activity suggests a hierarchy of importance that can be used when developing your action plan and determining the levels of protection, control, and ultimate value you apply.
- A companion step involves taking a similar inventory of your business processes, especially those that are central to your core business (like accounts payable, for example, and not employee vacation requests). The reason to do this is to get a fix on the information that is being shared via these processes, and thus are central to your operations.
- As your inventory progresses, always remember that hard-copy and electronic information have organizational value in equal measure. The trick is to cultivate a culture in which the distinction between the two formats disappears, and that the focus is placed and maintained on the information itself, not the medium on which it exists. This way you can put together a complete picture of what you’re dealing with, rather than individual pieces.
- For the same reason, be sure you don’t distinguish among databases, document repositories, and human beings when it comes to elevating the place information has in your organization. The tools necessary to maximize the value of the content that exists in each place clearly are different, but your asset-oriented thinking must embrace each one because they all contain relevant and valuable information.
- Negative factors are scariest and often drive strategy. But it is critical to also present the positives, for there are compelling reasons to adopt an asset-minded philosophy that relate to enhancing and not merely protecting the business.
- For instance, you undoubtedly have multiple opportunities to derive Maximum Total Value® from your information solutions by looking beyond just the money and considering ways to help people work better (process change) and work better together (collaboration). This in many ways is enabled by the intelligent care and feeding of your information: i.e., by properly using taxonomy and metadata to perpetuate its quality, structure, and credibility – characteristics that might be equated with a diamond’s Clarity, Color, Cut, and Confidence, which of course are four of the Five C’s used when appraising a given stone. These core determinants of value support sound business intelligence-gathering and decision-making, and your possession and curation of high-quality information boost your organizational value.
- The other side of the coin contains plenty of FUD, for sure, but also many real-world vulnerabilities, such as when you discover that certain people are seeing information that they oughtn’t be, or critical but improperly tagged information doesn’t surface when searches are conducted, or time is spent (and lost) because people have to verify the accuracy of the information they are using before they actually use it. But perhaps even more important is understanding and articulating just what kind of damage these vulnerabilities could lead to – and quantifying the extent of the potential damage. For example, unauthorized access could lead to privacy violations, missing information to bad business decisions, and poor information quality to competitive disadvantage. But just what could each of these problems cost in terms of fines, profits, or time? Appraisal is a critical component of asset protection, so metrics must be part of the equation.
- Remember at the beginning when we talked about Commitment? Well, policies are where that commitment comes home to roost for without them, all you have are empty words. My lawyer friends tell me that when they’re prosecuting cases, they’ll go after policies first – especially if the defendant doesn’t have any that address the issue at hand. So if you don’t have one, your first job is to get one! Image: http://blog.equens.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/rulebook-300x300.jpg
- Because every department relies on information to get its work done, they all must be included in the discussion so their various perspectives can be considered when the time comes to determining how to treat information as an asset. This is generally accomplished by establishing a cross-departmental steering committee that will develop the new modi operandi and enforce their adoption.
- Typical topics of coverage include information security, ownership, and usage, as well as procedures for making clear to everyone in the organization not only why treating information as an asset is a good thing but what the consequences are of failing to do so.
- Veterans of the information management wars will recognize in this the base elements of governance, and indeed, the dynamics are very much the same. If there’s a difference, it’s a cultural one in that “governance” is often perceived as a compliance chore while “assetization” should be viewed as a business investment.