Enterprise Information Management is a term that is increasingly being used to describe the process and management of the Information mountain that corporations globally are building. With the falling price of storage and ever larger storage arrays, the question of limiting the amount of data that we store continues to be a non-discussion. The business increasingly tells us that they want to store ever more data and the IT can support that storage.
Having just moved house I think the problem is that the bigger the house the larger the amount of clutter that you keep in it! I seem to have moved house (and country) fairly regularly in my career and lifetime and it is always a surprise as to how much of what is moved to a new home remains in boxes, untouched, for many months and sometimes years. In our last home we had downsized and ended up paying for 100 sq feet of storage. After 18 months of paying for the storage we decided that we really needed to get rid of everything that we had in the lock-up because we hadn’t even been to look for anything in any of the stuff that we had there.
Admittedly this is not really a direct analogy to what is happening in business but I am convinced that many organisations are storing more data and yet not making the best use of it. We still get situations where data is not joined up.
With the move to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) I think it is imperative that the next step is taken by businesses to get a grip on their data mountains. Charlie Bess in his blog entitled “Is the need for Enterprise Information Management a symptom of success?” suggests that “As we move into having a more service based approach to the IT environment … it will require more than just common data.” I can wholeheartedly agree but I would expand on the thought to include the concept of a Service based Business. The IT part of a business is working towards being a service to the rest of the organisation and has always been seen in that light. I think the next stage of evolution is that the business needs to see itself as providing services to the rest of the organisation and being part of the SOA initiative.
The data element of the landscape has been missed in the past and the need to manage the information tree is crucial to future success in managing fraud and customer service. Data is the bulk of the iceberg - images of the Titanic flash in my mind. Leave this uncontrolled and the business will be wrecked. Manage the data mountain, control the information headache and then start building the Business Intelligence and finally the Knowledge tree and the groundwork has been laid to begin to control data costs and become more outward looking in your approach to services.
Let’s take the concept beyond services and move to a goal based enterprise that has assembled services targeted at enterprise goals. This would take more computation than the slapped together SOA model being done in some organizations but it would be a good stretch target.
I think this is a tremendous suggestion - it would move the whole discussion into the strategic and business focused space. I think this would then add significant value to a business rather than the typical SOA engagements. Certainly an interesting line of thought.