Strategies and Trends for Information Technology Leaders
By now, most firms recognize that data is a business asset, and many are investing millions of dollars in cleaning, managing, securing, and harvesting it. These companies are realizing hard cost reductions and competitive advantage, but these benefits come at a cost because defining and implementing an enterprise data strategy is hard. Over the last…
For years we have been working hard to become information age organizations. But just as with continuous improvement and total quality management, being an information age organization has become the norm and no longer provides an advantage. What we need now is to become communication age organizations. Communication What we called the information age was…
Trust Not long ago, my subscription to the local newspaper expired. The paper sent me a notice asking me to renew for $190, but I was on the road for weeks and didn’t respond to the notice. By the time I returned home, there was a message from them on my voicemail asking if I…
Keeping up with a fast paced dynamic business is challenging if not impossible for most IT organizations. Fortunately, there are ways to improve agility and provide better support to fast moving enterprises. This article, the last in this series, discusses four key strategies for servicing the agile organization: Establish clear content lifecycle processes; Actively manage…
Develop consistent terminology An agile organization needs a taxonomy and enterprise metadata standards to make information more usable and findable. Think about what would happen if different parts of the organization spoke different languages — engineering spoke Spanish, legal spoke French and accounting spoke English. It would take a long time to get information from…
by Robert Simmons of the Forsythe Solutions Group A winning knowledge management program (KMP), one that increases staff productivity, product and service quality, and deliverable consistency by capitalizing upon codified intellectual and knowledge-based assets, cannot subsist on technology solutions alone, It must also consider people, processes, structure, and culture. Many organizations leap into a knowledge…
by Seth Earley of Earley & Associates In part one of this series, I explored how effective access to and, integration of, information enables businesses to receive more value from IT investments. This second installment addresses the role played by enterprise taxonomy in turning information into actionable knowledge. Information is actionable when it is understood…
Business changes faster than technology can support. That is just a fact of a CIO’s life. But there are ways to improve organizational agility and better support the demands of an ever-changing enterprise. This three part series will discuss various strategies for better meeting business needs. In this article, I focus on how to create…
As a young discipline, KM has many definitions and interpretations. Most efforts to date have misinterpreted knowledge management and equated it with content or information management. The term “management” brings about an illusion of exercising control and creating defined processes which automatically extracts the knowledge from people and puts it into searchable repositories within a…