PR or a Brilliant Analysis? You Decide
April 3, 2010
I just read and then reread “In Search of Information Governance in the Enterprise.” The author works at the type of service firm that I describe as an “azure chip consulting firm.” The blue chip firms—which are pretty exciting outfits due to the arrogance of their employees—operate on really big thought horizons. I used to work at a blue chip outfit and I am somewhat familiar with the notion of defining the agenda, using a thought leader as a poster child, and herding often clueless CEOs into a pen. The clients are not branded, but they do get their own team of whiz kids to help the CEO achieve her objective: money and lots of it. Now there are lots of powder puff words to describe “money”; for example, value for stakeholders and treat employees like family, etc etc. The azure chip crowd is somewhat more pedestrian and their horizon is defined not by the 35,000 foot view but more often the perspective is a few feet above sea level in my opinion. The information governance write up aims higher, but does the Citation jet get off the runway. You will have to read the full ZDNet article and make up your own mind.
I noted a couple of interesting points. Let me highlight what caught my attention:
First, there is an anecdote about a flawed content management system. Get the old content into the current RSS news feed and you have a solid example of folks who don’t know how lousy content management systems are. The other take away is that most organization’s information technology shops are further underwater than dual income home owners’ McMansions. The problem is management, not information. Folks running organizations today have, in my opinion, have unmanageable organizations. Business books cannot solve systemic problems. Information systems exacerbate existing management problems. Information has been plentiful for a long time, and management methods have not kept pace. Ungovernable organizations with clunky enterprise systems are pretty crazy operations.
Second, the old chestnut, Moore’s Law, is referenced. The idea is that the notion works for storage. Cheaper storage begets more data hanging around. With more data, finding what’s needed gets harder. Rinse, repeat.
Third, some new ideas are floated. One is an information tax. Okay, I work for a company and I, as an employee, have to pay for information I need to do my job. Or, I am the CEO of a company and I have to pay someone to have data. What if I am a mobile phone company. I have lots of data, and I have to pay a tax to deliver my service. I just scratched my head.
Bottom-line. Read this article by the consultant. If it makes sense to you, hire the consulting firm. Make millions. Ride off into the sunset like the savvy Enron executive who got out before the bottom fell out. If you are like me, you will be deeply skeptical about any consultant’s advice, blue, azure, whatever. There is no substitute for knowing what you don’t know and finding people whom you can manage to provide the information you need to meet your goals. Shortcuts don’t work for most companies in my experience.
Keep in mind that I am a person who now sells his research and provides some knowledge product outputs. I don’t call myself much more than an addled goose. What have I learned? If it sounds too good to be true, the assertion is. Oh, I can’t figure out if the write up is a blog story, an advertorial, or an individual’s opinion,.
Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2010
No one paid me to write this opinion.
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