Business Considerations for a Successful IG

Business Considerations for a Successful IG

Program ITS 833

Dr. Mia Simmons

Chapter Overview

■ This chapter will cover pages 97 in

your book.

■ This chapter begins the deep dive

into the IG reference model we spoke

about in Chapter 6.

■ We will also look at the business

issues that arise with business costs

and real value costs for IG programs.

2

Changing Information Environment

■ Unstructured Information

– Growing too fast for people to manage

– more structure than others containing some identifiable metadata

(e.g., e-mail messages all have a header, subject line, time/date

stamp, and message body.

– Alias: semistructured information

– creates enormous complexity and risk for business managers to

consider while making it difficult for organizations to generate

real value

3

Changing Information Environment ■ Unstructured Information – challenges involved:

– Horizontal versus vertical – Unstructured information is much more horizontal, making it difficult to develop and apply business rules.

– Formality – The tools and applications used to create unstructured information often engender informality and the sharing of opinions that can be problematic in litigation, investigations, and audits—as has been repeatedly demonstrated in front-page stories over the past decade

– Management location – application of management rules more difficult than the application of the same rules in structured systems, where there is a close marriage between the application and the database

– “Ownership” issues – this non-ownership mind-set can make the imposition of management rules for unstructured information more challenging than for structured data.

– Classification – business purpose of unstructured information is difficult to infer from the application that created or stores the information

4

Calculating Information Costs

■ Rising information storage costs cannot be dismissed

– storage is treated as a resource that has no cost to the

organization outside of the initial capital outlay and

basic operational costs

– IT departments do not see (or pay for) the full cost of e-

discovery and litigation

– lost benefit of information that is disorganized, created

and then forgotten, cast aside and left to rot.

5

Big Data Opportunities and Challenges

■ Smart leaders across industries will see using big data for what it is: a

management revolution

■ All data is good and more data is better

■ We must balance the benefits and costs of managing big data in order to

be successful within the organization.

6

Full Cost Accounting for Information ■ Full Cost Accounting (FCA)

– TCO and ROI play a major roll in FCA

– seeks to create a complete picture of costs that

includes past, g future, direct, and indirect costs

rather than direct cash outlays alone

– Triple Bottom Line Concept

– Applying FCA will increase cost transparency and

drive better management decisions

7

Full Cost Accounting for Information ■ FCA Total Cost of ownership – Cost to consider:

– General and administrative costs, such as cost of IT operations and personnel, facilities, and technical support.

– Productivity gains or losses related to the information. s

– Legal and e-discovery costs associated with the information and information systems.

– Indirect costs, such as the accounting, billing, clerical support, contract management, insurance, payroll, purchasing, and so on.

– Up-front costs, such as the acquisition of the system, integration and configuration, and training. This should include the depreciation of capital outlays.

– Future costs, such as maintenance, migration, and decommissioning of information systems. Future outlays should be amortized.

8

Calculating the Cost of Owning Unstructured Information

■ to inspire creative thinking about how to calculate the cost of owning

unstructured information and help organizations minimize the risk—and

maximize the value

■ Must establish facts about unstructured information need to include:

– Go find your unstructured information – enterprise wide, including s

e-mail systems, shared network drives, legacy content management

systems, and archives.

– Enable fast and intuitive access to basic metrics , such as size, date

of last access, and file type.

– Provide sophisticated analysis of the nature of the content itself to

drive classification and information life cycle decisions.

– Deliver visibility into the environment through dashboards that are

easy to for s non specialists to configure and use.

9

Sources of Cost ■ Examples of elements that typically increase cost (“Cost Drivers,” on the

left side) & elements that typically reduce costs (“Cost Reducers,” on the

right side)

10

The Path to Information Value Seventy percent of managers and executives say data are “extremely

important” for creating competitive advantage. “The key, of course, is knowing

which data matter, who within a company needs them, and finding ways to get

that data into users’ hands.”

— The Economist Intelligence Unit, “Levelling the Playing Field: How

Companies Use Data to Create Advantage” (January 2011)

■ Navy Yard are considering these as rebirth:

1. Clean. Survey the site to determine what had value and what did

not. Dispose of toxic waste and rotting buildings and modernize the

infrastructure.

1. Build and maintain. Implement a plan to continuously improve,

upgrade, and maintain the facility.

1. Monetize. Lease the space.

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The Path to Information Value

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New Information Model ■ Information Calorie

– Tips for organizations:

■ Educate executives and employees about the cost of information

mismanagement s through anecdotes, case studies, and facts.

■ Show employees their information footprint by regularly exposing them

to the t amount of data storage they are using in e-mail, shared drives,

content management systems, and other environments they work with.

■ Design systems to minimize information calories.

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New Information Model ■ Information Cap-and-Trade

– Tips for organizations:

■ Baseline the desired amount of information per system, department,

and/or type t of user.

■ Create information volume targets or quotas, and allocate them by

business unit, system, or user.

■ Calculate the fully loaded cost of a unit of information and adopt it as a

baseline metric for the “trade” part of the system.

■ Create an internal accounting system for tracking and trading

information units, s or credits within the organization.

■ Get creative in what the credits can purchase.

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Future State: What Will the IG-Enabled Organization Look Like?

■ IG is infused into operations throughout the enterprise and coordinated

on an organization-wide level—it will look significantly different from most

organizations today

■ Valuable information from projects, product development, marketing

programs, and strategic initiatives will be retained in corporate memory,

reducing the impact of turnover and providing distilled information and

knowledge to contribute to a knowledge management (KM) program

■ Standardized data governance program in place means cleaning up

corrupted or duplicated data and providing users with clean, accurate

data as a basis for line-of-business software applications and for

decision support analytics in business intelligence (BI) applications

■ Standardizing the use of business terms will facilitate improved

communications between IT and other business units

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Chapter Summary ■ The business case for IG programs has historically been difficult to

justify.

■ IG professionals must be ready with new models that calculate the risks of storing too much of the wrong information and the benefits of clean, reliable, accessible information

■ Key steps in driving information value are: (1) clean; (2) build and maintain; and (3) monetize.

■ The information calorie approach and information cap-and-trade are two new models for assisting in IG.

■ Legal risk is reduced through improved IG, and legal costs are reduced.

■ Leveraging newer technologies like predictive coding can improve the efficiency of legal teams.

■ Identifying sensitive information in your databases and implementing database security best practices help reduce organizational risk and the cost of compliance

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Information Governance

Chapter 7

Complete Week 6 Objectives