What is most important asset to manage in your SMB?
Information – Build an information management strategy based on your informational governance framework.
It will position your business for growth.
Here’s how…
Target: Business owners without a CIO.
The role of a CIO: Chief Information Officer is responsible for reducing the overload of the sum of information and increasing the throughput of the valuable information.
Who decides what is VALUABLE? Start here.
Owners/ Executives
Finance/ Bookkeeper/ Accountant
Legal/ Fed/ State/ Compliance/ CYA/ Lawyer
Users/ Employees/ People you work with and work for
What information matters most to them?
What business processes are supported?
What is the timeliness, relevancy, accuracy, consistency, of this information?
What is the knowledge value of all of the information that you incorporate in your day-in and day-out duties?
By asking these questions to your “information stakeholders” you are creating a team that will value different information differently, but now you are shedding light on what information is an assest to your company and why. Now it is a matter of asset management tied to business process and business outcome.
Therefore, you started asking questions and getting more answers. What do you do next? What is the next step?
Create a strategy model that will be your guide.
· Identify key stakeholders who understand the risk and reward potential of restructuring valuable information.
· Ensure the strategy includes activities, deliverables that support and facilitate or otherwise add value to the current business goals.
· Tie the strategy to business outcomes that everyone agrees are business goals.
· Make sure the scope is very clear.
Now you can decide from among all of the different types of information, the different people who consume it, and the regulators who may be interested in it, and deliver value by managing the parts that you are able and guiding the information towards a strategy that delivers value. This information (asset) should now flow toward the people, the processes, and the business outcomes that are most important to the business outcome.
Each stakeholder can split their information into thirds.
Once you have gathered this information and picked it apart from all of your stakeholders, you can then build your information governance framework for your company.
This process is a building block toward “information agility” and ultimately and information strategy that provides the ability to deliver the right information, at the right time, to the right person or people, in the right format, for the right reason.
By striving to achieve “corporate information agility”, you will position your company and its information strategy to grow valuable information that will in-turn grow your business.
I will take this a step further.
Now look across your business as a whole. Consider that timely accurate information will always yield timely accurate business decisions and results. How about the risk and reward potential of information by merit? Timeliness = Value How about search? Think of it in terms of content and data quality. How about Analytics? The idea of optimizing the way you process your analysis. How about access? Stakeholders can now access the right information for the right reasons.
Now you have flipped your IT department from the NO department to the YES department. You are essentially enabling your stakeholders while controlling the risk.
You are now in control from a risk context, but more importantly you are “in the driver’s seat” from a reward context.
Start your engines. You’re back in the driver’s seat.
If you would like more information about how to establish your company's information governance framework or would like to work on your information strategy, please visit our website www.mountain-scanners.com or you can send me an email. jon@mountain-scanners.com
Jon Zalinski
Mountain Scanners
