Quality is not an act, it is a habit
Quality is not an act, it is a habit
In 2001 Tom Peters, author of 'In Search of Excellence', stressed the importance of data and information for organizations as follows:
"Organizations that do not understand the overwhelming importance of managing data and information as tangible assets in the new economy will not survive."
And indeed, the amount of information produced in the world now doubles about every year and a half, accumulating to about 45 zettabytes (45 trillion Gb) by the end of this decade. This does not necessarily condemn every organization to the use of Big Data. But it definitely does lead to great changes in the use of information for the enterprise development.
We see for instance, that enterprises are looking for new sources of data, new ways to analyze data, and to apply that analysis to the business, with new revenues as a result. Analytic methods are shifting from descriptive to predictive and prescriptive, driven by data analysis in real-time. Organizations are also increasingly adopting self-service business intelligence and analytics, giving executives and knowledge workers easy-to-use software tools for data discovery and timely decision-making.
An unfortunate side effect of this is, that in IT the emphasis shifts from the 'I' to the 'T'. And that is undesirable, because the goal in IT should be, first of all, to ensure the quality of the information produced rather than a blind focus on the technology used. After all, the total cost of the mismanagement of information, and the misunderstandings and poor results that are the result of that, is extremely high. Actions are taken that later on appear to be wrong, redundant processes and information are created, lack of information clarity slows down decision processes ruining the agility for mergers and regulatory initiatives, such as HIPAA, Sarbanes Oxley, Basel, BCBS 239, GDPR, and Solvency. And the workers that fail to understand what is wrong with the data burden the few that do.
So, there is every reason for putting an end to this fatal tendency in IT. A good opportunity for this is offered by setting up a sound governance for information management, in short (and actually as a 'pars pro toto') Data Governance. In the new DMBOK, DAMA-DMBOK2 (DAMA International 2015), we see a few remarkable changes. DMBOK2 aligns itself, for instance, to other BOKs by speaking of 'Knowledge Areas' rather than 'Functional Areas'. In the blue wheel (see figure 1 in the top-right corner), which refers entirely to Information Management, the wheel section 'Data Integration & Interoperability' is added, and the old wheel section 'Data Development' is renamed to 'Data Modeling & Design'. This stresses once more the importance of information modeling and data(base) design for an efficacious information management. But what stands out even more, is that this latter wheel section has driven the discussion about best practices and the linking of data governance to information modeling, with some new and challenging DMBOK2 discussion points as a consequence. Ah yes! The essence of Fact Oriented Modeling is now also recognised in the USA, as it already has been for quite some time in the Netherlands.
In the first figure top right the new, prominent role of fact oriented modeling methods in the DMBOK2 is clearly displayed. And the essence of our services is the optimal deployment of 'Fact Oriented Modeling' in information management. That is precisely why Rob Arntz and I have elaborated the 'Information Management Frame'.
