Managing Your Information Asset: Three One Day Workshops on Information Strategy, Information Governance and MDM

Day 1
Establishing a Sustainable (BIG) Information Strategy

Many studies have indicated that we have evolved from the age of automation to the information age. Proper information management and insights have become a linchpin that act as a catalyst for the execution of your business strategies. Information can be supporting or defining your business model. Having the data in your organisation is not enough as the true value comes from your ability to turn the data into operational information and insights that allow you to create business value and make strategic and tactical decisions. Aligning your information requirements with strategic business objectives is critical.

Every day organisations make business decisions assuming the information in their system is accurate, but for many it can be costly if the data is flawed, out-dated or unchecked. In a market where everyone is striving for more insights through data, the accuracy and trust of your data can make the difference between competitive advantage and bad decisions.

Aligning your information requirements with strategic business objectives is critical. Organisational, procedural and technical capabilities and policies need to be put in place to provide information management capabilities.

The industry has recognised the potential of information and we’ve witnessed an exponential growth in related tools, database solutions, BIG Data platforms, appliances, Data Refineries, Data Lakes, analytics, algorithms … However many companies are struggling to deploy these concepts in a sustainable and effective way. The number of data breaches and data related incidents are rising at the same, if not higher rate. For that reason the approach this seminar takes is to embrace the innovation and disruptive ability of insight but to embed it in the organisation in a sustainable way.

Do you recognise that information is a valuable asset but do you struggle to deliver on that value?

This workshop teaches you how you can turn your organisation around and make it information centric delivering on the promise of accurate and trusted business information.

Introduction

• The value and risk of accurate and trusted information
• The impact of declaring Information a corporate asset
• Measurement of information value including confidentiality, integrity, availability, compliance, reliability effectiveness and efficiency.
• Common information challenges

Information Strategy

• Information Governance Mission and Vision
• Information and data policies
• Types of information and how to deal with them
  • Master and Reference Data
  • Transactional Data
  • Unstructured data
  • Big Data
• Defining your information risks
• Determining the business value of information
• Creating an information strategy roadmap

Information Management Methodology

• Introduction to existing frameworks: DMBOK, Mike 2.0
• Integrating your information management with other frameworks such as TOGAF and COBIT

Becoming Information Centric: establishing the information capabilities

• Data Lab, Data Reservoir and Data Lake: advantages and challenges
• Data Refining and Discovery:
  • How do you improve the speed of analysis
• Insight in Database architectural options and their relevance for your business model:
  • Column Based Storage, Appliances, In-memory Computing, NOSQL, Hadoop, …
• Positioning the information management patterns;
  • Virtualisation, Extract-Transform-Load, Enterprise Application Integration, Webservices, Enterprise Service Bus, Change Data Capture
• Managing the information life cycle
  • Data Quality and Profiling
    • Understanding the as-is
    • Validation and Cleansing
    • Active data quality
  • ILM platforms:
    • IBM Optim, SAP ILM, Informatica ILM, …
• Maintaining Privacy and audit compliance
  • Trusted Data Management and protection

Getting insight out of your HOV (aka BIG) data

• Providing Self Service Insight
• Positioning the Data Engineer
• Supporting Business Analytics and Data Science
• Integrating the BICC into the delivery model

Complying with regulations

• Data Privacy
• Data Protection
• Ownership and traceability
  • Impact on roles and activities

Executing the Information Strategy

• Making the business case
  • Convincing the boardroom
• Implementing an ‘Information centric’-organisation
  • Roles, responsibilities and processes
  • Setting up the CDO role
  • Integrating the Chief Information Security Officer and the Data Protection Officer in your information Strategy
  • ‘Information Governance’ in the context of other domains, (Enterprise Architecture, Master Data Management, Knowledge management, Business Intelligence, etc.)
  • Organisational structures
• Challenges for the implementation of an ‘information strategy’
  • Information in a ‘process centric’ organisation
  • Defining the correct scope
  • Understanding and translating business priorities

Conclusions and recommendations

Your information strategy may have set the direction but the route is long and winding.  Information governance assures the shared meaning, attitudes and capabilities are consistent with the information and insight risk and value.

Increasing operational complexity and data volumes in today’s organisations often result in unacceptable data quality, escalating costs and redundant development efforts.

You need to establish processes, policies and controls to manage information on all media in such a way that it supports your organisation’s immediate and future regulatory, legal, risk, environmental and operational requirements. The end result will be valued data assets, while lowering the cost of keeping the information consistent.

There are many opinions and books in the market that define operating models for executing information governance but the many years of working with customers has taught the presenter that the key to success is the understanding of the level of maturity of your organisation and the target objectives. This seminar focuses on a consistent role framework that you can adapt to your own organisation.

Do you recognise that information is a business asset but do you struggle to set up the proper roles, processes and architectural principles to manage the information asset?

This workshop teaches you how you can establish and sustain shared meaning and understanding of information and setup the proper tasks, roles and organisational structures that are fit for your level of maturity.

Introduction

• The value and risk of accurate and trusted information
• The impact of declaring Information a corporate asset
• Measurement of information value including confidentiality, integrity, availability, compliance, reliability effectiveness and efficiency.
• Common information challenges

Information Definition

• Managing business semantics through correct definitions and information criteria
• Establishing ‘speech communities’ and vocabulary management
• Defining data and information includes semantic, syntactic and lexical rules so we can make sure names are consistent.
• Build your own common shared vocabulary based on your business information model.
• Definition versus Discovery
• Dealing with “closed systems” including ERP
• Building or buying a vocabulary or business semantics
  • SBVR, ISO 11179, …
• Integrating industry standards into your organisation
• Publishing definitions and quality rules

Information Governance

• Structural Compliance
  • Transforming the Information model to a data model
  • Mapping the information to the data
  • Linking to the IT portfolio management
• Content Compliance
  • Defining and transforming information quality rules to executable constraints
  • Assessing the information quality
  • Defining the content compliance roles
  • Root cause analysis of quality concerns

Framework for Information centric roles

• The activities that are needed to define and sustain the information in your organisation
  • Ownership
  • Architecting the data landscape
  • Actively guarding the information quality
  • Setting and steering the strategy
• Establishing the Information Governance Roles
  • Assigning ownership, stewardship, custodian
    Handling meaning and content
• Data Governance for enabling efficiency and compliance
• Competency management and requirements for executing the roles
• Dealing with incremental insight and agile methods
• Linking Information Governance to Enterprise Architecture

Metadata Strategy

• Achieving lineage with a metadata repository
• Requirements for metadata management
• Standards and their applicability

The Information – and Data governance solution landscape

• Glossary Management
• Data Quality solutions
• Information life-cycle management

Challenges for the implementation of an ‘Information Governance’-program

• Information in a ‘process centric’ organisation
• Handling semantics using Agile methods
• Defining the correct scope
• Understanding and translating business priorities

Conclusions and recommendations

In the age of automation, these types of information that are supporting the business processes were stored in the automation solution, ERP had customers, CRM contained the customer relation information. The result is a scattered data landscape with inadequate quality and ineffective information management.

Organisations need to invest in a corporate master data platform allowing them to take a strategic approach to master data management by embedding the processes that ensure the on-going integrity of master data. The master data platform will need to evolve over time as the information strategy forces organisations to increase the accuracy and trust of a broader set of information types. The industry recognises this evolution with the increasing focus on multi-domain MDM over PIM, CDI and Reference Data Management. Often the MDM/RDM solution on it’s own doesn’t unlock the full potential which is why this seminar focuses on several use cases in their broader context.

The promises BIG data sometimes bypass is a result of the fact the lot’s of BIG Data won’t be effective unless you have trusted LITTLE data to understand the context and to get truly the right insights.

Do you recognise that little data matters but struggle to keep it consistent?

This course teaches you how can keep your master – and reference data accurate and trusted.