Peter Aiken introduces the concept of information management and argues that information is a valuable corporate asset that needs to be managed rigorously. The document discusses how the rise of unstructured data poses new challenges for information management. It outlines the dangers of poor information management, such as regulatory fines, damage to brand and reputation, and inability to access the right information to make good decisions. The document argues that smart organizations will implement information governance to exploit their information assets and gain competitive advantages.

1. Bestpractice
Exploiting your information: Information is one of your organisation’s most important assets.
Handle it correctly, and it will help you deliver improved products and services, cut costs,
create happier customers, comply with regulation and many other benefits besides.
Best practice guide
The fundamentals of
Information Management
www.ipl.com
The fundamentals of Information Management
Version 2.0. © Copyright IPL 2013
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2. All material contained within this document is the
property of the respective author and should not be used
or reproduced without the author’s permission.
© Copyright IPL 2013
Bestpractice
Foreword
Unleash the power of your organisation’s information
Peter Aiken PhD is one of the world’s
top Data Management authorities and
is president of DAMA International, the
Data Management Association. He has
spent time working at the United States
Department of Defense, Deutsche Bank,
Nokia and many other large organisations.
He has been a member of the Information
Systems Department at Virginia
Commonwealth University’s School of
Business since 1993 and jointly owns,
with the University, Data Blueprint, a data
management and IT consulting firm.
Data and information are everywhere: organisations across the globe are creating a
veritable deluge every minute of every day as they go about their business. And these
vast quantities can quickly come to threaten your viability and profitability. But the
world’s smart organisations are not seeing this information as a threat; instead, it’s an
opportunity that can give you a significant advantage over your competitors – so long
as you handle it correctly. And that’s what Information Management is all about.
Information Management presents different challenges from other asset management
disciplines, such as finance and personnel management. These activities are all about
managing scare quantities of the asset, where for Information Management, the opposite
is true. The difficulty is in identifying the valuable information so that it can be exploited.
And if you are able to do so, the rewards can be significant, namely that you enable
your staff to make decisions more quickly and with much greater confidence than
they can currently.
To get there, you need to go on a journey that will guarantee the information your
organisation is exploiting is discoverable, accurate, trustworthy and timely. Fail to do this,
and you’ll just end up making bad decisions more quickly. But get it right, and you’ll be
on the road to delivering better products and services in the face of shrinking budgets,
having more satisfied customers and, ultimately, enjoying greater profits.
IPL’s Best Practice Guide helps you understand the nature of the information problem,
and take your first steps towards doing something about it. Your information is there to
be exploited – and now’s the time to do it.
Information Management
EnterpriseSearch
MasterData
Management
Data
Quality
Information&
DataStructure
Information
Assurance
Data Governance
Information
Exploitation
What is Information Management?
Information Management is the
execution of a set of principles and
processes to derive maximum value
from your organisation’s information,
while protecting it as a key corporate
asset. This information could be
structured, semi-structured or
completely unstructured.
Fundamentally, if your organisation
believes that information really is a
valuable strategic asset, then it needs
to be managed with similar rigour and
discipline as should be your other
corporate assets, such as finance
and people.
Peter Aiken

3. 1
Bestpractice
1. See http://bit.ly/imcio
The volume, complexity and criticality of
data in just about every organisation –
public and private sector – is ballooning,
and it would be easy to let this deluge
spiral out of control by doing nothing
about it. But data and information (that
is to say, data in context) are not merely
annoyances that must be contained;
they are among your organisation’s most
important assets, alongside your people
and finance. Your information value
chain is where data is transformed into
information, then knowledge, and finally
wisdom or intelligence, and it must be
managed effectively. By doing so, you can
obtain valuable information, knowledge
and intelligence that sets you apart from
your competitors. Ultimately, this derived
knowledge and intelligence guides every
decision your organisation makes.
It’s therefore imperative you put the right
information in front of the right people at
the right time to enable them to make
the right decisions. Furthermore, these
decision-makers must be able to trust the
information. So, managing your information
isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’, it’s a must if you’re
to stay ahead of the competition, enjoy the
greatest possible benefits to your bottom
line, and deliver better services in the face
of shrinking budgets.
Getting your Information Management
(IM) right will also help you reduce costs,
understand your customer and their needs
better, ease the burden of regulation and
legislative compliance and enable you to
react more swiftly to new opportunities.
The rise of unstructured data
Traditionally, the quantity of structured data
that organisations are handling in databases
has grown at a predictable rate, meaning
that putting in place the procedures to
manage this information has been more
straightforward than it is now. The change is
due to the increase of unstructured data –
such as images, videos and the sort of free
text found in social networking posts. As
this data continues to grow in unpredictable
ways, smart organisations should take
steps now to handle and exploit it.
The dangers of getting it wrong
Failure to manage your organisation’s
information will have consequences,
ranging from minor annoyances to
regulatory fines and other issues that could
threaten the company’s survival and the
job security or even freedom of your CEO.
Gartner, the leading IT research body, went
so far as to predict that by 2016, 20% of
CIOs in regulated industries will lose their
jobs because they haven’t implemented
information governance successfully1
.
The spread of internet-ready phones and
tablets, combined with the popularity of
social media and blogging platforms,
means that information can travel faster
and to more people than ever before. So if
you don’t manage your information properly
and the wrong piece of knowledge – or an
incorrect piece of knowledge – gets into the
public domain, it can spread like wildfire.
Depending on its seriousness, this can
quickly whip up a PR storm that damages
your brand and customer goodwill, even
if the information is later shown to be
incorrect. The key is to make sure the
information you are handling is accurate –
and that it is adequately protected.
Information Management is particularly
important for any organisation operating in
a strictly regulated environment, such as
the financial or pharmaceutical sectors.
Your ability to comply (and prove you are
complying) relies on effective management
of your information. Failing to comply with
regulation or legislation – or being unable to
show you are doing so – will have severe
consequences. These range from your
directors being prosecuted and potentially
jailed, to the firm going out of business as a
result of a fine, disciplinary proceedings or
loss of customer confidence.
These are two of the more extreme
examples of how poor Information
Management can be damaging, but there
are many more ways in which this can –
and does – happen. Someone may order
the wrong stock, or a salesman may fail to
follow up a potentially lucrative opportunity,
both as a result of not having access to the
right information at the time they needed
it to influence their decisions. Similarly,
incorrectly captured or duplicated data
could affect the customer experience when
they interact with your organisation.
The symptoms of poor IM
Nearly all organisations will have areas
of Information Management that they
could improve on. The symptoms of
poor Information Management can show
themselves in everyday situations, most
obviously when it comes to knowledge
management, including:
• The inability to find the information you
need to make a decision.
• Not knowing where to look or who to
ask for a particular piece of information.
• Not knowing if your organisation
possesses a given piece of information.
• Several individuals giving different
answers to the same question.
• Different business queries that you
believe should return the same results
actually provide different results.
• Lack of coherent Master Data for key
corporate data areas.
• No accountability for managing the
information asset within the organisation.
There are many other ways in which poor
Information Management can show itself
in an organisation. Ultimately, however it
manifests itself, it is damaging in some
way, and smart businesses will move fast
to put in place measures to get it right,
so that they can reap long-term benefits.
These measures are a combination of
processes, people and technology: the
latter alone cannot adequately manage your
organisation’s information.
The importance of good
Information Management
Understand why you must manage your information, and spot the signs that you’re not
Chris is a well-published author, thought
leader and regular speaker on Information
Management. He has worked in IM for
over three decades and continues to
advise well-known multinationals on how
to govern and exploit their information.
Structured Data
Unstructured Data
“Smart businesses will move
fast to get their IM right”
Chris Bradley

4. 2
Bestpractice
Information Management is a wide-ranging
discipline that affects every member of
staff in your organisation. The ultimate
goal of putting in place an Information
Management strategy is to deliver valuable,
trusted intelligence to your decision-makers
when they need it, and thereby offer
better products and services at a lower
cost. At this stage, it may seem tempting
to go running down the quick-fix road of
implementing a point technology solution
to help exploit your information – such
as a collaboration system for knowledge
management. After all, this could rapidly put
information at the fingertips of your staff to
help them do their jobs.
However, while doing this may indeed
speed up decision-making, how do you
know they’re the right decisions? By
putting in place an information exploitation
or knowledge management tool without
assessing the quality or provenance of the
information being fed into it, you cannot
be sure the intelligence it is producing is
trustworthy, and therefore whether the
decisions you are making based on it are
the right ones. This is why you need to start
your Information Management initiative by
putting in place strong Data Governance
foundations. Your organisation and all its
staff need to recognise that data is a crucial
asset, and to treat it accordingly.
To this end, you must put the right people
in the right roles throughout the company to
look after your information, and implement
Data Governance principles, policies,
standards, processes and procedures.
These are required to ensure data is
handled in the right way, such that you can
ensure your organisation’s information is
accurate, timely and trustworthy.
All about the people
Many organisations today have a Chief
Information Officer, or CIO, who has ultimate
responsibility for the firm’s data. Typically,
this individual will have been an IT or
technology professional, prior to becoming
CIO. Having this kind of background may
lead to more emphasis being placed on
the technology side of things than on the
information side. A technology-focused CIO
may believe that an IT system is sufficient
to manage the organisation’s information,
when in fact it is only part of the solution.
For this reason, it is best to have someone
from a business background on the board
as well, who can champion the case for
proper Data Governance procedures,
which will ensure any technology solution
delivers the desired benefits.
This role is becoming known as the Chief
Data Officer (CDO), who is in charge of the
information and knowledge side of things.
Having a CDO creates a separation from
the existing, technology-focused CIO, who
can become the Chief Technology Officer.
This will create a balance at management
level to put in place an Information
Management strategy and structures that
will deliver benefits long into the future.
The building blocks of Data Governance
Your Data Governance work must be
underpinned by a set of principles,
which will guide and govern the more
specific policies, standards, processes
and procedures that you put in place.
The principles should be specific to your
organisation’s business needs, and would
typically include statements such as ‘data
is not duplicated’ and ‘data is shared by
default’.
The next step is to develop your Data
Governance policies, guided by the above
principles. Develop a range of policies
relating to areas such as Data Quality
Management, Data Warehousing, Business
Intelligence and Metadata Management.
These must be applied throughout your
organisation and reviewed regularly.
Having a series of Data Management
standards – and knowing your organisation
is adhering to them – will demonstrate
effective data management control, though
this isn’t explicitly part of Data Governance.
These standards could include document
and report templates or static data
definitions and lookups. Most importantly,
you must be sure your organisation adheres
to the policies and standards you put in
place, and you’ll most likely need a carefully
defined approach to how you’ll do this.
To apply the principles, policies and
standards we’ve talked about, you need
to understand the business processes
within your organisation that affect the
management of data and information.
Review these to identify any improvements
that are required and where new processes
for Data Governance are needed. Crucially,
the processes must be designed to ensure
data is being managed as an asset, and
this typically requires you to consider how
humans will alter data during its lifecycle. To
this end, staff will probably require specific
procedures to follow.
Procedures direct staff on how to perform
a specific task, and are required as part
of your Data Governance groundwork
to ensure the principles, policies and
standards are followed.
While putting the above principles, policies,
standards, processes and procedures in
place may seem like a time-consuming
task, it is an investment well worth making.
By doing so, you will have built a rock-solid
foundation on which you can now create
systems to help exploit your information,
and thereby offer better products and
services at a lower cost.
Laying the Data Governance
groundwork
Successful Information Management needs to be built on strong foundations
Ian is an Information Management
specialist, who has designed and
delivered Data Governance structures at
major public sector organisations.
Data Governance
Standards
Policies
Principles
Procedures
Business Processes
“Your staff need to recognise
that data is a crucial asset”
Ian Sinclair

5. 3
Bestpractice
Building on your foundations
Take the next steps towards exploiting your organisation’s data
What direction your Information
Management journey takes once you have
put your Data Governance foundations
in place depends on your organisation’s
priorities. To begin, you need to identify the
areas that offer the greatest business value
in the shortest possible time: the quick
wins. Throughout the process, remember
why it is you’re assessing and making
changes to your Information Management
processes: namely to exploit your
information better, so that every decision-
maker in your organisation is able to make
the right choices more quickly.
Below, we’ll look at some of the areas
you’re likely to need to assess. Remember
that attempting to change the world
overnight is unrealistic: start where you
can bring your organisation the most
benefit, and then move on to other
areas. Disciplines where you are likely to
need improvements include Master Data
Management, Data Quality, Information
Assurance and Data & Information
Structuring.
Improving your Master Data
Management
Master Data describes the ‘things’ of
significance within your organisation – the
key nouns in your business vocabulary.
These don’t all need managing, so Master
Data focuses on the ones that are created
or updated in several places, long-lived,
valuable, complex or reused. In essence,
it’s the data that’s important to multiple
areas of your business, and needs to be
handled consistently – a simplistic example
would be whether you talk about ‘cars’ or
‘vehicles’. Master Data Management looks
at ensuring this important data is correctly
managed across your organisation,
ensuring that the right data is delivered to
the right place when it is needed. Because
as soon as inconsistencies like car vs
vehicle creep in, the chance of errors in
the data being displayed increases, with
potentially severe consequences for your
organisation.
The first task is to identify your candidate
Master Data, as part of a Data Asset Plan.
Once you do this, you can design, build,
deliver and operate the right controls to
ensure it is managed as a critical asset and
that the governance policies you devise are
suitable for the areas that will consume or
amend the data.
Selecting the right data and bringing it
under Master Data Management control is
a complex process. This kind of initiative
typically focuses on technology. However,
you should first take into account factors
such as business ownership and Data
Quality. Understanding the current business
footprint of your Master Data subject area
will ensure you implement and deploy
appropriate software to manage Master
Data across your entire organisation.
Assuring the quality of your data
Another area where you almost certainly
need to make improvements before
you can begin reliably exploiting your
organisation’s information is in the quality
of your data. Data Quality looks at the
accuracy, coverage and currency of
data, and a problem in any one of these
areas can be a major contributor to poor
decisions, failures to comply with regulation
and legislation and eroded customer
satisfaction. As a result, they pose a
significant risk, and you need to monitor,
measure and strive to improve your Data
Quality continually.
Data Quality problems may arise from the
design of your applications, where free text
fields, for example, can lead to the wrong
data being entered. In the medium to long
term, you should look to fix this kind of
issue, because it is the root cause of your
poor Data Quality. Tweak the systems that
are allowing the poor-quality data to be
created. However, if this isn’t possible in
the short term, put in place measures to
monitor and repair the data as it is created.
The best way to assess the current state of
play when it comes to Data Quality in your
organisation is to run an audit. This can
typically be carried out reasonably quickly
– generally within a few weeks. An audit
would start by identifying appropriate target
data sets, and then analysing the data in
detail. Following this, the auditors would
collate the results and produce a report and
recommendations to improve matters and
monitor for future problems.
Once you know that the data your
organisation is using is of high quality, you
will be able to trust the knowledge and
intelligence you derive from it, and therefore
take decisions with greater confidence at
every level.
“Identify the areas that offer
the greatest business value in
the shortest possible time”
Data
Asset
Plan
Design
MDM Architecture Principles
Governance
Build Deliver Operate
Trevor Hodges

6. 5
Bestpractice
Information Assurance
Ensuring that your data is of high quality
is important, but you also need to be able
to prove that this is the case. For a given
piece of data or information, you must be
capable of showing where it has come
from, when it has been manipulated, and
who has edited it. Having this data lineage
means that you can make decisions with
your eyes fully open, understanding the
provenance of the data.
Having an audit trail is especially important
in any sector that is strictly regulated, where
you must be able to show convincingly
that your organisation is complying. An
Information Assurance strategy with full data
lineage will provide you with the required
audit trail for your data, so that you know
what you can and can’t rely on when it
comes to making decisions and complying
with regulation and legislation.
Building the right data structures
Putting in place and imposing the right
information and data structures will ensure
your staff can get to the information
they need and work with it as efficiently
as possible. Traditionally, in the world
of structured data, the structure is by
definition known and clearly defined from
the start, most probably in the design of a
database. However, semi-structured and
unstructured data will not be stored in a
structured database. This means that if
you want to search and exploit it, you need
to impose some kind of structure onto it
retrospectively.
There are tools that can help you structure
your data in a useful way. It’s vital you put
in place the right structures across the
board from the start, from your low-level
physical data model, through the logical
and conceptual data models to your
subject area model. If you simply leave the
structures – both in your databases and
your filesystems – to develop organically
as data is added to them, the whole
landscape will descend into chaos. With
data stored all over the place, it will become
difficult to find and exploit it – in effect,
recreating the sorts of information silos
that you need to eradicate.
As you design your data structures, think
about the environment they will operate
in: there will be compliance issues and
security requirements, for example. More
important, though, is the need to ensure
your data structures work for the staff that
will be using them. They should fit in – as
far as possible – with their existing ways of
working, so that complying requires minimal
effort. If you don’t, and the systems are
difficult or slow to use, people will revert
to creating their own, local structures for
data, rendering worthless your efforts to
make your organisation’s entire body of
data exploitable. It’s therefore vital that you
keep these things in mind before you start
looking at software procurement.
Once you’ve put the relevant building
blocks in place to assure the quality and
structure of your data, you can start to look
at exploiting it to aid your decision-making
with confidence.
“It’s vital you put in place the
right data structures across
the board from the start”
Currency
Coverage
Accuracy
High
Data
Quality
Trevor has worked in Information
Management consultancy for more than
a decade, including assisting oil giant
Statoil with its corporate Master Data
Management programme.

7. 6
Bestpractice
Exploiting your organisation’s
information
With the groundwork in place, you can reap the benefits of good Information Management
The goal of any Information Management
improvement initiative is to enable your
organisation to make better decisions, and
thereby offer improved services, reduce risk
and increase profit. As a result of the solid
foundations you’ve laid down by putting in
place the Data Governance groundwork,
processes for Data Quality, Master Data
Management and suitable Information
Assurance processes and structures,
you can exploit your information with
confidence, safe in the knowledge that the
intelligence you are basing your decisions
on is both timely and accurate.
The key to doing this is by presenting your
information effectively, using Business
Intelligence. And depending on the goals of
your Information Management initiative, you
may also need an Enterprise Search facility.
Presenting your information
To exploit your information successfully, you
need to present it to the right people at the
right time, in the most appropriate format.
The key to doing this is to focus on the
business needs of your decision-makers,
rather than starting from a technology
perspective. Before you design your reports
or build an Enterprise Data Warehouse,
take time to really understand your users:
what do their jobs require them to do? What
kind of information do they need at a given
time? It may be insufficient simply to ask
such questions of the users: a workshop
or in-depth study of their role could be
what’s needed to unearth the insights
that will enable your Business Intelligence
professionals to deliver reports that
genuinely help them do their jobs better.
By fully understanding your users and the
outcomes they require, you can begin to
put in place the Data Warehouse and Data
Integration procedures to deliver the data
from your organisation’s systems into the
reports that will enable your users to exploit
it. The Data Warehouse must be carefully
designed to make it straightforward for
report creators to find the data they require,
while the Data Integration processes –
which typically include extract-transform-
load (ETL) – can take time to get right. The
benefit of spending this time is that the
reports will be of the greatest value to your
users, thus enabling them to make better-
informed decisions more quickly.
Some reporting tools, such as Microsoft’s
Power View, enable end users to create
their own reports, charts and more using
intuitive drag-and-drop features that require
little or no training to use. This will help them
be more productive, and means you won’t
necessarily need to wait for your Business
Intelligence specialists to deliver new
reports. Work with your decision-makers to
understand who would benefit from such
self-service, to what extent it should be
offered, and take steps to deliver it.
As with other areas of your Information
Management work, your reporting capability
can be delivered in phases: experience
shows that an iterative approach to
Business Intelligence is suitable in most
situations, building each iteration on strong
foundations. The key to this approach is
to make sure you deliver visible business
value in each phase. This will underline the
benefits of what you are doing, and help
secure buy-in for later instalments.
Enterprise Search
When delivering any system designed to
exploit your information, it needs to be able
to find things effectively from across the
organisation. To enable this, you need a
reliable Enterprise Search tool. This may be
one that your decision-makers use directly,
or it may be a behind-the-scenes facility
that your data presentation systems use.
It’s absolutely critical that the search system
delivers reliable results, because users will
otherwise revert to less efficient, unreliable
methods of storing and finding information,
such as saving local copies. This will lead
to the sorts of Data Quality issues you’ve
worked hard to eradicate.
Firstly, the search tool must be powerful
enough to cope with growing quantities
of information: can it scale up to meet
future demands? If you’re searching semi-
structured and unstructured data, you’ll
need a more powerful tool than if you
were only accessing structured datasets.
However, there isn’t a need to spend lots of
money on a tool that includes features you
simply don’t need. Fancy browsing tools
are not required if a textual search gets you
the information quickly.
Second, for your search tool to work
effectively, the data will need to have been
tagged appropriately and thoroughly when
it was created or stored, using terms from
an established taxonomy or thesaurus. The
taxonomy should evolve over time as your
organisation’s needs change, to ensure it
remains relevant.
Making confident decisions
Crucially, because you’ve put in place
structures to manage your information
properly – from creation to exploitation –
you can have every confidence in what is
being supplied to your employees. And by
extension, therefore, you know that your
decision-makers – from board-level to new
graduates – are able to make the best-
informed choices possible to drive your
organisation forward. This will see you able
to deliver improved products and services,
lower risk and cost, better compliance and,
ultimately, greater profits.
Richard is an experienced Business
Intelligence architect who has played a
major role on information exploitation
projects at clients including the
Financial Services Authority and BP.
Image above contains Department for Transport Data
© Crown Copyright
Richard Back

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