Enterprise Information Management. Are online media doing it right?
The gap that separates the theory from the pratice is something that we assume as business managers. We know that all those things they taught us in our business school are very difficult to implement straight away when landing in an organization. For this reason, if someone keeps on reading theory, white papers or state of the art technological developments and is not the final decision maker but just, and, at most, a “middle manager” then either it is completely frustrating or it is like watching Sci-fi movies. For the sake of our mental health , for sure the dozen of readers of this blog are middle managers at most (if not, we would probably be ”too busy” to read anything) we should adopt the latter attitude.
Reading the PDF behind this form I had again the experience of how obvious it is what is said in that white paper, and how hard is our daily life. We got resources, talent, even money to be closer to the best practice, but we are so far from it. Below, I am just going to copy my summary of ENTERPRISE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT: Strategy, Best Practices & Technologies on Your Path to Success.
EIM (Enterprise Information Management) is the effort to build up an organizational coherent information management so that information is delivered when, how, and to the person who need it. Benefits of EIM are:
EIM is an answer to the unorganized data management that is suffered in many organizations. Middle managers are those who realize it at the beginning because they are using the systems and they are the ones being pushed by objectives. Top management is in a different battlefield. Therefore, it is a middle management responsibility to push this topic in the agenda of top management. Fortunately, some companies have a top management that is able to quickly understand the importance of adopting correct data governance; some others are not.
Before having an EIM strategy there must be a vision. EIM strategy responds to a concrete vision and objectives and change with them, it is also flexible and adpatable. In order to get EIM done it is important:
- IT/Business collaboration, understood as regular and constant communication and cooperation.
- Trusted information. If the information delivered is not trusted, EIM would just be a failure.
- Enterprise-wide standards. Everyone has to talk the same language and use the same tools.
- Data Governance, a corporate agenda for data.
Apart from that nowadays information management must be:
- SOA support. Service Oriented Architecture is a middleware becoming an standard between data and interface applications.
- Centralized data management.
- Complete functionality (it should serve all organizational goals)
- Seamless integration. For each functionality there are world class applications that are able to inter-operate through SOA.
- Easy of use
On the other hand, without data integration it is not possible to build trust.
The purpose is to get information from business processes and to load it to a master data management system. For this, ETL (extract, transform and load) process is key, together with a data quality infrastructure that should come together with your EIM strategy. To ensure data quality it is necessary to manage metadata (data about data). At the heart of data integration is MDM (master data management) which is more than software, a system of practices policies for data collection.
