Part of The Beginning and The End of Information Management.
Point to the data people
I often did a bit of a pantomime early in my information management engagements with clients. You get yourself in a room with people from sales, marketing, information technology (I.T.), customer service centres, engineering, operations, field services – all over the organisation, at any level of seniority you please.
I’d let the conversation roll around a little and people would share their own reasons for why they were there and what problems they were trying to fix. Then I would ask “So, who is responsible for the information? Who manages it?”.
Everybody in the room would point to the I.T. guy. Firstly, it really was usually a guy, so that’s not being sexist in any way. But they’d just as happily point to a woman and they’d just as happily point down the hall if the I.T. team hadn’t even been invited to the meeting so that they could “keep it business focused”.
Before I’d get a chance to say anything, and I knew I didn’t need to, the I.T. guy would shake his head and reluctantly smile. He’d look sheepish but also a little smug. He’d look the way I.T. folks look a lot because they are often really smart, and often really driven to learn about their work, and know a lot of stuff about how your business works from the perspective they have managing your I.T. systems.
For all of this knowledge your I.T. folks have, they certainly aren’t in any way responsible for your organisation’s information! But before we even get to that there is already a problem we have to address. Why didn’t we ask this question earlier and how long have we been operating with this assumption?
If everybody in every department really does think the I.T. department, if not literally that one guy they invited to the meeting, is responsible for managing their information then we need to assume they haven’t been taking a systematic approach to managing it themselves.
If the I.T. department has in fact been the only group reluctantly taking a systematic approach to managing that information they need to get both credit for the successes they’ve had as well as the criticism for the failures that are likely already attributed to them.
More importantly, if the I.T. department is responsible for managing your information what happens when their initiatives to address information management challenges aren’t funded? What happens when a senior executive from marketing prints out a list of customer’s addresses and medical conditions and accidentally leaves in on the bus?
The idea that your “information technology” department is responsible for your information is wrong. I personally have a view that you could easily make them responsible for your information. But that takes effort and must of course be supported by increased authority. But today, in the average I.T. department the assumption is that “the business” is responsible for the information. The I.T. department controls “the pipes” but what flows through them is somebody else’s problem.
There are two reinforcing assumptions, they are equally perverse, and both must be challenged. Business units who think that being responsible for information is somehow beneath them and a job for “technical people” are making a miscalculation about the economics of information. I.T. departments who think there is a single, integrated, concept called “the business” that you can defer responsibilities to are either playing a game or burying their heads in the sand.
A quick overview of the first 30-40 years of the information technology revolution will help us understand how we got here.