“A Day in the Life of an Analyst” at Gartner’s IT/Expo Symposium – Day 3

Day 3.  The ride continues.  More ideas.  More silver bullets.

So before I forget, update from day 2:

• In one 1-1 yesterday I met a CFO.  That was fun.  Much more business centric conversation
• At dinner last night the client compared our session to their dinner with Daryl Plummer last year.  They said our dinner conversation was better!!!!!  However it was really because I had a silver bullet for the CIO.  I thought it was my sparkling conversation..

Anyway, here’s a recap of day 3

5.20 woke up and called home to get the wife and kids up.

6.40am used my “muse” to train my mind.

As you can see from these two screen shots, the activity monitored during the 3-minute periods were different.  Both sessions were recorded roughly at the same- early morning before I had left my hotel room.  Monday morning my mind was more settled.  Tuesday my mind was much more active and harder to control.

Each time the device calibrates your current brain activity through a couple of tests.  You are asked to think of a number of items and the device determines a level set of ‘active engagement’.  Then the real test starts.  You hear sea lapping up against a shore, and you are asked to count and observe your breathing.  As your mind wanders and other ideas pop up, the device senses the additional activity and a wind picks up and continues to build as your mind continues to wander.  You then try to control the randomness of how your mind works, and focus on the beach and the breathing.  So the wind does down.  If you can keep focused you get to hear birds fluttering by.

Monday I heard quite a few birds.  Tuesday I heard mostly wind.  I think the new ideas brimming in my mind are just too exciting and my Muse seems to sense it.

7.19am breakfast and brisk walk over to the 1-1 pavilion

8am started 1-1’s.  Here is a consolidated view of the question and topics covered in 1-1’s, dinner, drink, and corridor conversations:

1. business relevancy/business case for EIM/ starting journey 6
2. information strategy/road map 5
3. information governance/prioritize efforts 4
4. specifically MDM 4
5. big data 3
6. data lakes 3
7. best practices 2
8. data dictionary 2

Silver bullets distributed today 5

at 2.30pm today I was lucky enough to participate in a Round table on “roles and responsibility for IT and Business involved in information governance”.  Here are my notes from the dialog with over 20 organizations and overflow around the room):

1. How to get data ownership into business?  Focus on change mgt; metrics – to drive line of business focus to drive change in their behavior
2. How to get business to want to care about the data? IT needs to listen more, and learn how to re sate the problem as an answer that is relevant to the business person; to unearth the value prop; don’t talk about data definitions etc
3. Is information governance new or part of something established? Still need to establish within core, main business processes, not outside
4. It’s not s data issue; state the business outcome or metric that is held hostage by the data
5. Does information governance create new skills?  Yes architecture and it needs to be embedded in business, not in its own discipline or office; DQ too- embed, not outside;  No longer independent; we got so caught up in documenting and not actionable work
6. MDM is not a tool it’s more a process
7. Where does IG roll up too?  Where in business?
8. Public sector has same data issues but we focus on records mgt not necessarily MDM
9. Some business leaders accept the issue but they think it’s a technology issue
10. Hire a business relationship mgr to help market information governance to business
11. When business and IT are perceived as culturally separate, establishing information governance is likely harder to work into the business
12. Business may need to feel pain first, before they accept need for information governance
13. Best practice: common metric to drive behavior, linking to business outcome
14. Bad practice: inventorying information equates to boil the ocean and most often waste of time as here is no connection to business value or case
15. Best practice: focus on agile start small; IG has to be agile
16. Business architecture drives information architecture
17. Engage with the business and seek to change the conversation from integration and systems, focus on capability of business work
18. Best practice: Document and understand the flow of information across business systems
19. You can hire tech skills for enabling tech etc. like analysts, DQ tools. Not so much the leader that sets policy; can’t hire the risk analysis, same for compliance
20. Warning – there is a shortage of people with right skill sets; there are many inside the business though that are capable – how to get them
21. Firms are formally defining data owners, data stewards still very vague and not well established
22. What can you offer to business users in order to obtain their time to support IG?  Align work to what the business needs or is asking; increase buy-in, maybe use crowd sourcing
23. Passion is most important trait ; seek huge desire over experience; still need the source institutional knowledge though at the center
24. We don’t want too many business process focused folks-  we have too much of these already
25. CDO also owns (where it exists) business continuity mgt and risk
26. MDM location (retail) not .likely to stand alone.  May need to extend to product/ merchandising since location is so ingrained and embedded in supply chain and product.

I than had a 1-1 and a Team Send conversation with a services organization where we explored the EIM framework.

6.05pm dinner with a client I have had  the good fortune to work with for many years now.  I hope they will soon share their story as a case study at our upcoming 2015 EI and MDM Summit.

Word of the daycongruonse (alignment and leverage of information investments) Graphic of the week: hierarchy of metrics (relating data to business outcome) theme of the week: where to start, and how to grow a connectd set of information initiatives to create something of greater value: synergy: EIM