Information Management – A taxonomy to mature your organization

So your data is inaccurate, incomplete and inconsistent, and your teams are wasting precious time manipulating data or your customer service is constantly being compromised. These business data problems are experienced in every business today and your ability to bring these issues to life and convince your stakeholders of the cost and magnitude of the problems will dictate how successful you are in achieving your business objectives.

Worse still, if you don’t have visibility of how poor data is compromising your business then first steps involve establishing some level of visibility for your senior management. But where to start?

There are a couple of different approaches you can take to address the business problems created by poor data. Firstly, you can take a bottom up approach to the problem and be quite specific about the business issues and interrogate specific data sets and get a sense of the various cost impacts and level of data quality that is hindering your business. This certainly has a direct cost that can be understood by stakeholders based on man hours spent doing the unproductive tasks caused by poor data.

Alternatively, you can leverage one of the many different methodologies available to drive a top down development of your data management capability to better manage your data assets. A number of different methodologies and approaches exist to support your Data Management planning and maturity such as Mike2, ITIL, TOGAF, COBIT.