More on the Information Environment methodology

Ever since I've been doing corporate information management roles I've had this theory about how businesses could do all of this better.  It's been evolving over the years, and I think that I've finally got it sorted inside my own head now.  The exciting thing for me, as mentioned previously, is that my job is really a blank slate to trial this whole thing. I'm not sure yet how supportive the Executive will be with it all, but I'm hoping to convince them that we need to do this work so we can truly know where we are and plan to get to where we want to be.

I've fleshed the previous image a little more, and actually have some of the templates developed.

Proposed structure of the Information Environment methodology

As an aside, I hate methodologies, mainly because I've had some less than optimal experiences with people who seem incapable of operating without one, and blame any lack of progress in a project on the "methodology" and not their own inability to understand some extremely simple concepts. Maybe I should come up with a better term... I'll have a think about it.


So what is this and what do I hope to achieve with it?

In my experience, organisations make some less than optimal decisions about information systems, and therefore how they should be spending their time and money in the information space.  I've previously written about the problems with management and IT making decisions on these things, and my aim is that having this structure in place will reduce some of these problems (I know, I'm an optimist).

The diagram shows the elements that need to be in place to support good decision making, and an operating environment that is easily navigated by everyone involved.  How many times have you started a new job and not known where to look for the information you need to do said job? You ask the people around you and they say things like "you need to get access to the X system, but I don't know who does that?", or "I don't know the proper way, we just ask Mike to email us the report" or other such nonsense.

Wouldn't it be nice to walk into an organisation and have a roadmap of the information environment, what information is contained in which system, how to get access to that system and how that information might link up with other datasets? As an information manager that is my utopia! If I could do that for an organisation then I would feel like I had really done my job.

I think that the diagram is fairly self-explanatory at this stage, but in future posts I aim to flesh out each of the elements of the environment, to go into more detail on the role they will play in this utopia.  As I mentioned, this has been going through my head for over five years now, and I've really only just worked out how some of this hangs together and how the elements will support the business decisions.

I would really love any insights that other people might have on this, maybe it's time to put the blog into my LinkedIn and see if I can generate some traffic.