The Information Management Blogosphere and Program Success

In choosing a topic to blog about this month, I decided to make “choosing” the topic. I spend most of my working hours at client sites, working with all levels of the organization, with an obvious focus in the information management areas. I bring attention to those outlets that I think will provide them some value and knowledge. I encourage my client to have a culture of continual learning, which includes blogs, articles, podcasts and live talks.

Occasionally I will see an industry magazine that looks like it’s been opened or I know of a podcast attended, blog read or conference attended. Conference attendance seems to be an established element of our culture. Most professionals get out to one per year. White papers also get some traction. However, that is where the formal learning among the professionals who deploy information management seems to stop for many.

Rather than focus on the demand side of the equation and cajoling the community to just read more of the existing blogs, I thought I would focus on what it is that is being written for their consumption. On the one hand, I reviewed all of my favorite blogs and online resources for information management to see what they are talking about. As a voracious reader of these things, this was my chance to pull out of the trees and look at the forest.

On the other hand, I looked at where information management professionals spend their time. Where they spend their time is likely where they would want to spend their reading time – helping them do their jobs better!

I developed a quadrant of information management topics. Sure, there is overlap in the topics and we could quibble about the labels, but I’ve tried to create discrete categories. The x-axis refers to the time that is spent on the topic in information management. The time is across all members of the team and considers all information management disciplines including data warehousing, business intelligence, master data management and data quality.

The y-axis refers to what is important to success in information management. I may step on some sacred cows here. These activities are all important, but sometimes you just have to prioritize. I’ve spent most of my time over the last 15 years leading these projects so I have a good perspective on these axis’. I’ve owned and consulted on several multi-million dollar budgets and have been all over the quadrant.

The yellow highlighted items are the ones that get the vast majority of the attention in the blogosphere, with the purple highlighted items getting lesser, but still measurable, coverage.

Platform Selection gets a ton of coverage not because teams spend a large percentage of their time on it – or even a large percentage of salary and consulting dollars if you want to look at it that way. It’s because those are big purchases and the vendors start the conversations that take place in the blogosphere. They have marketing dollars to do this. End clients don’t generally bring the subjects of discussion. They’re usually on the receiving end.

However, people costs will be about half of the platform costs in the first year of a project and more than half, possibly quite a bit more, over the lifetime of the project. The majority of the people in information management never breathe on the platform selection process. Yet, the things they do can easily make or break the projects.

The disproportionate coverage of some topics, for this reason, have given them the perception of a disproportionate correlate to success. But you don’t need to be fooled. The project is not nearly over once the platform is selected and the strategy set. They are very important steps among many others on the path to information management success.

Considering this as a model, if you’re an information management leader, from any position, you would want to make it a point to reach out more for information on those topics of very high importance that are high time consuming. These include:

• Architecture
• Business Requirements Gathering
• Data Modeling
• Data Quality
• Leadership
• Quality Assurance
• Source System Analysis

Hey – kind of like the topics focused right here on the ERWin Expert Blogs!

What do you think? Did I put the topics in the right quadrants? Should IM professionals be choosy in what they pick off?