Wednesday
5.45am up and ready to go – 15 minutes later than normal. Cleared inbox but very light again – Symposium work levels. Read CNBC news pages. Spotted a tell tale item: The U.S. government takes in $277 billion in tax revenues each month, and spends $452 billion each month, for a monthly deficit of around $175 billion. If I had a personal deficit every month, I’d be in trouble and would have to cut back. On my flight down to Orlando I was reading the Wall Street Journal and a graph spotted stuck in my mind. It’s an amazing picture so I kept the printed copy. Here is the URL Just look at the line (for government debt) go up and up and up over the years. I am not sure this data includes unfunded debt – I don’t believe it does. So the actual area under the debt line should be bigger.: Thankfully the shower calmed me down. What is it with these politicians? Remembered seeing the tit-for-tat announcements yesterday between John Boehmer, House leader and President Obama. How school playgroundish that looked. Ted Friedman has been thinking about the data versus application integration question I proffered. He has some ideas he wants to share. Should be good follow up.
6.30am headed over for breakfast early today. Lovely and cool and dark outside – nice walk to the Dolphin. Breakfast was Canadian bacon with my fresh fruit. So we had sausage Monday, streaky bacon Tuesday, and Canadian bacon today. I wonder what tomorrow will bring.
6.55am back at the analyst work room. Tagged all my client interactions from yesterday into my customer inquiry database. This number of interactions in such a short period of time adds great value to this data. Checked the stats for the week so far: 22 specific client interactions.
8.00 1-1’s here we go. Hang on. Time for TIM?
11.30am last 1-1 of the morning closed – though it was a no-show and I was collared by someone else. Rushing off to lunch with another client. At least it was nice to sit and eat a salad.
12.45pm finished lunch, walked briskly over to the Dolphin pavilion to get back to 1-1s.
2.15pm my 1-1’s finished, and I had run over to the Swan to present: How to Evolve from Master Data Management to Enterprise Information Management. The point of the deck is to highlight what aspects of MDM can be re purposed for EIM, this saving money and re using assets and skills, to increase that part of the information landscape that is increasing business value. It’s not a technical presentation by any stretch of the imagination, but I draw on numerous dialog’s with end users that have struggled with MDM but have figured out how to get over numerous challenges. I kicked off talking about my own experience with the Quantified Self – using Jawbone Up and Withings to help lose weight. Then I related the coverage of instrumentation and how working and exploiting IT is changing our society in a book I am reading, Average is Over. I called out that MDM is just one starting point of EIM, but that was the focus of this presentation. And we spent quite a bit of time looking at the 7 building blocks of EIM – a framework for success.
I had a few questions afterward, and I had to walk quickly back to the 1-1 room for a client booking at 4pm. The dialog prompted me to realize that there is one slide missing from the deck I had just presented. The outline of the deck shared a vision for an EIM road map (conceptually). But this road map does not allow for “where I am today”. In other words, every end user client has its own unique “configuration” of business, IT maturity, governance acceptance, application and information landscape and so on. So the immediate step “toward” an EIM strategy will necessarily be different for each organization. I needed to have this key point in the deck.
5.30pm 1-1 last one wrapped up for the day. Walked through the floor, caught up with a couple of vendors. Compared notes. Back to my room to clear emails. My number of notes that need peer review is piling up. I need to get on to it. Also having difficulty trying to complete teem agenda planning tasks for 2014. Schedules are so dynamic being that inquiries take precedence, that I need to get better at working on times that won’t get used up by client inquiry.
6.30pm off to meet with a client for a drink. It was nice to sit and rest at the end of the day. And I even had some time left over afterward to check emails. I didn’t do any serious work though, so headed off to bed around 10pm.
Overall summary of the questions that crystallized Tuesday:
- how to develop a strategy to exploit (i.e. make money) on my information assets?
- how to build an EIM strategy; what does it look like?
- how far do I go with information governance and MDM before I need to acquire technology?
The first one is new, but being addressed by a number of analysts with different context from innovation (Doug Laney), content management (Mick MacComascaigh), information governance (myself, but many others too), search, analytics (the whole BI team), and so on. The second question is just so obvious. But also scary. The third was a new question that started to emerge on Tuesday.
Some of the questions were literally, “how do I define a strategy?” Some were more specific, or richer. Several manufactures or industrial forms who sell to consumer and even other organizations across multiple channels, recognize they have challenges with product and customer master data,, as well as opportunities with big data. There are also aspects of other data, related to products, customers, locations, partners, and so on. So where to start? How to relate to business value? Does MDM do all this? How to align and govern content? What about risks in the data if not organized properly? Does EIM do all this?
Seems to me we might need to create some blue prints, some guardrails that show what an Information Strategy is. Luckily I have a pitch underway (the Business of Information Management) that might provide an channel for that work. We also need to demonstrate more concrete examples of “how to” get from A to B, where each is a specific IM project or program. These seem to be the real questions users have.
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