The technology of information – Islands and Boats, and Bridges

The inversion is deliberate. Just to see if this will facilitate a focus on information rather than on technology. Unless we keep reminding ourselves that technology is a facilitator, an enabler, we run the risk of letting it become an end in itself. IT has an inward focus; IS (information services) has an external focus – users.

Information is power only if it is available and in a form that lends itself to be useful for practical action. Else, it just becomes technology that has turned in on itself, ceasing to refer to the world for which it is used. This may come across as an extremely uncharitable remark but is not. In any packaged or even bespoke software, this often comes through clearly in the ‘Reports’ that the software ‘generates’, which tend to be aggregations or dis-aggregations of the gathered data in many variations but not necessarily keeping in mind the needs of users. Consider also the fact that this world is replete with accounts of abandoned software with (enterprise) users moving on to new ones in the hope that the new will yield what the old did not. Quite recently, this happened in the ‘intelligence’ market, which we have addressed in one of the articles.

A distinguishing feature of this world has been a growing proliferation of software, despite a so-called ERP (enterprise-wide resources planning). So much outside what is addressed by ERP is taken care of by different kinds of software, each catering to specific needs. In addition to ERP, there is a host of some business software, accounting software, CRM, operations intelligence software, procurement software, production systems, HR with or without performance management which can be a separate software and so on. In the financial services industry, the list is probably longer largely because of multiple regulatory requirements. What is obvious here but is advisable to formally express is that important information is available in many places within an organization. Information or data aggregation is a necessary activity given multiple software capturing different kinds of information.

Islands of information

To go back to the idea of users, the first point that anyone needs to remember is that there are different kinds of users with different levels of decision-making with different potential impact. This is arguably the most important aspect when we speak of analyzing the data gathered. Mr Narayana Murthy, founder CEO of Infosys, used to say the potential impact of his decisions dramatically increased with the increase in Infosys’ scale of operations. Something needed to be done to enhance his confidence in the decisions he took: appropriately presented data which portrayed at least key dimensions of the business and its operations in a form and fashion that literally ‘speaks’ to the users. This can only emerge out of a deep understanding, besides domain knowledge, of designing information dockets and users’ needs, isolating the key variables that will affect the decision. A lot of dedicated thinking is required to design information display, without losing sight of the information.

To add to this, while everyone loves to talk of a connected enterprise, this portrayal of the ground reality suggests that there are several connected units and sub-units but it is debatable whether the organization as a whole is. I see many islands of information, not necessarily silos, each self-sufficient but islands. Each island has a flow of information internal to itself although some information could flow outward, either as an input to some other department or function or just as FYI.

In itself, I don’t think this is alarming because any organization is not a completely unified whole but comprises of some connected and some separate units. Both in terms of information supply and serving organizational goals, units and sub-units can function very well without being ‘connected’ to all; a networked organization, just not completely. Each unit and sub-unit needs to develop a summary at a defined frequency which is ‘fed’ to any other unit or sub-unit that needs it; no one, other than the unit members, needs the whole data.

Summary, summary

If there are islands, we need boats and perhaps bridges too. Just as boats ferry people (and goods) to and from islands at defined frequency together with ad hoc ferrying, we need information also to be ferried to and from the source to several destinations, within and without an organization. The ad hoc ferrying is needed to address events that may not be captured by defined frequency ferrying. Anyone who has worked in any reasonably large organization know, such instances are quite common. Experience suggests that bridges, as permanent structures, too are required, to facilitate many automatic pass through of formatted information.

Hence, the summary design becomes an all-important factor. You simply have to ask who else in the enterprise needs this information and for what purpose, focusing particularly on whether this information becomes an input or is for reference. Hence, what is likely is that there may be need for more than one design but many to suit the requirements of the receiving unit. Nothing daunting as it needs to be done once for it to become a routine matter; templates are a way of life. In my view, many falter because the question is not posed from the perspective of the flow of information and who needs what and why.

This is where formats become everything. We could have said that interface management keeps becoming more and more important but I doubt that, per se, captures what we are discussing here. Information can be used only if it is in a form and fashion that is in sync with users’ needs. Anyone with even a limited practical experience of pre-defined ‘reports’ in an information system will immediately understand this because, often, such pre-defined ‘reports’ end up being unused as they are not in the appropriate format. Even ‘reports’ designed by the enterprise IT team also fail to ‘speak’ because it has not incorporated users’ needs. For a simple reason: the person designing this has seen this as an output forgetting to ask, for whom. The output is an input for someone, could be the CEO, who has limited time in which to take decisions of great impact!

If there are islands of information and we have to live with them, we need to better understand each in terms of input and output, with an unrelenting focus on the flow of information, which include internally and externally sourced documents, in multiple formats. Undoubtedly, this has to be in sync with access control and need to know principle defined by an organization, but focused on facilitating information supply.

Information logistics

Surprisingly, a sub-discipline called Information Logistics has been in use since 1997 but seems to lie outside the mainstream understanding. In an article on information flow in a small scale application, Magnus Lundqvist, advocates adopting the Information Logistics approach: “From an information flow optimization and demand driven information supply point-of-view one of the most important concepts is Information Logistics (ILOG). A short explanation of this concept is; the art of providing the right information at the right time to the right place. The scope of this can be an individual, a machine/facility, or any size of networked organization”. It has three main components – content, time and location. This is confirmation of the need to design appropriate formats of information I referred to just a while ago. It is also a confirmation of the idea of islands of information I described above, each self-sufficient but islands nevertheless. The point to recognize is that there is nothing wrong with islands per se; they are perfectly habitable. They just need boats and bridges.

Takeaways

Focus on information flow, not information technology

IS not IT; users not providers

Understand the direction and purpose of the flow

Formats of information are important