Rethinking Information Architecture for the New World (Part 2)

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Last week, in part 1 of this topic, I posed the discussion and some questions around whether it makes sense for traditional enterprises looking to modernize themselves, to reconsider their fundamental perspectives on their information architecture and how they perceive the value of new and growing areas of information inside their enterprise walls. I mentioned organizations like Kaiser Permanente and Washington Post. So, what if we have health care reform pass this year (a big what if), and there is a requirement for HMO’s to comply with some federal standards around patient history and digital medical records. Even if this isn’t necessarily mandated, do we really think that a health care provider can remain competitive in tomorrow’s marketplace without eliminating the inefficiencies of having non-digital patient data records? There are new businesses emerging every day, including Google and Microsoft, who are trying to establish a footprint in the electronic medical records business which they, aptly, see as a very strategic position with significant market power (and profitability) in the future of the health care industry. And in the case of Washington Post, it is experiencing attacks from all side, starting with blogging sites (built upon Google’s Adsense revenue) all way to Craigslist (a website rising to pretty much own one of the most profitable areas of newspaper business - classifieds advertising). This trend will leave Washington Post with holding the most expensive and least profitable area of their business – journalism. I like the HMO and the Newspaper businesses to discuss the value of information architecture because, I believe, these are two business models that are good examples where maintaining the status quo around their information architecture is a likely path for self-obsolescence.

Today, if you are in charge of looking after your organization’s information strategy, a lot rests on your shoulders regarding your organization’s future survival. In this hyper information-centric competitive landscape, it is not good enough to achieve operational excellence with your IT infrastructure. It is not good enough to deliver IT capabilities within your IT budget. It is not good enough to meet your SLA’s to the different organizations and functions you serve inside your enterprise. Your role is now becoming larger than that and more strategic, if your organization is to survive against a growing set of information-based competitive attacks. The information acquisition, maintenance and distribution strategy needs to be part of how you compete and how your market yourself.  A CIO has to start thinking less like an IT professional and more like a marketing strategist in the new world. For example, the Washington Post CIO has to figure out how it can use it’s current online subscriber base to enter the world of blogging where they can invite popular bloggers to be part of their information and social networks. Washington Post can lend them their subscriber base’s eyeballs whereas Washington Post could do advertising revenue shares with them. A traditional newspaper could leverage its strengths (e.g. brand and loyal subscriber populations) and be a news platform rather than a new provider. In any case, these are all possibilities if the right information network is built where you are able to execute these kinds of business strategies.

My point in all this is not to see yourselves as new white collar people who starts drinking Cognac with the CEO and the CFO and moves into the executive suites and never visits the data center again. No, I am too much of a techie geek to advocate that lifestyle. Instead, I think the two sides of the business must meet more often than it does today and come up with a better strategy that aligns both sides around how the organization treats information.

The marriage between business and IT started off in the right way in the nineties when business discovered the power of information and implemented that ERP systems to solve its business automation needs. What has happened is that the business environment has changed considerably over the last decade. But the information strategy has pretty much remained as is. So, today, the business doesn’t feel that IT is truly delivering on their promise while IT feels underfunded and generally neglected.

Today, we are reading this blog because we, as architects, have been asked to see if we can fix this marriage. That, by the way, is why are seeing so much discussion and emphasis on enterprise architecture. Enterprise architecture is a basically another name for taking an objective perspective on the causes and sources of misalignments between the business and information technologies.

So, the basic challenge, we face today as EA’s, is creating a conversation between the business and IT to share a vision for a common strategy that both sides can agree upon and execute to maximize the chances of success for the entire organization. We can use EA frameworks and methodologies to do this but our focus and objective should be on three basic things:

1. Establish a common language for conversations between business and information technologists (an EA framework usually calls this the business architecture)

2. Define a shared set of principles around how information is treated and leveraged by the business

3. A governance model for course correction when strategies and tactics are not working and need to be rethought.

If no 3 had existed, this alignment issue probably would not have been so dire and we wouldn’t need such a major rethink of our information architecture today. We would have course corrected ourselves incrementally over the years, if there was some form of governance around managing alignment between business and information strategies.

I guess this is like most human relationships. Sometimes there needs to be a fight before the two sides can figure out a good and lasting answer to their problems.

 

p.s. In our next part of this topic, we will be discussing those 3 items above and some actionable next steps for your getting your information re-architecture off the ground.



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