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Part of The Beginning and The End of Information Management.

Point to the data people 

I often did a bit of a pantomime early in my information management engagements with clients. You get yourself in a room with people from sales, marketing, information technology (I.T.), customer service centres, engineering, operations, field services – all over the organisation, at any level of seniority you please.

I’d let the conversation roll around a little and people would share their own reasons for why they were there and what problems they were trying to fix. Then I would ask “So, who is responsible for the information? Who manages it?”.

Everybody in the room would point to the I.T. guy. Firstly, it really was usually a guy, so that’s not being sexist in any way. But they’d just as happily point to a woman and they’d just as happily point down the hall if the I.T. team hadn’t even been invited to the meeting so that they could “keep it business focused”.

Before I’d get a chance to say anything, and I knew I didn’t need to, the I.T. guy would shake his head and reluctantly smile. He’d look sheepish but also a little smug. He’d look the way I.T. folks look a lot because they are often really smart, and often really driven to learn about their work, and know a lot of stuff about how your business works from the perspective they have managing your I.T. systems.

For all of this knowledge your I.T. folks have, they certainly aren’t in any way responsible for your organisation’s information! But before we even get to that there is already a problem we have to address. Why didn’t we ask this question earlier and how long have we been operating with this assumption?

If everybody in every department really does think the I.T. department, if not literally that one guy they invited to the meeting, is responsible for managing their information then we need to assume they haven’t been taking a systematic approach to managing it themselves.

If the I.T. department has in fact been the only group reluctantly taking a systematic approach to managing that information they need to get both credit for the successes they’ve had as well as the criticism for the failures that are likely already attributed to them.

More importantly, if the I.T. department is responsible for managing your information what happens when their initiatives to address information management challenges aren’t funded? What happens when a senior executive from marketing prints out a list of customer’s addresses and medical conditions and accidentally leaves in on the bus?

The idea that your “information technology” department is responsible for your information is wrong. I personally have a view that you could easily make them responsible for your information. But that takes effort and must of course be supported by increased authority. But today, in the average I.T. department the assumption is that “the business” is responsible for the information. The I.T. department controls “the pipes” but what flows through them is somebody else’s problem.

There are two reinforcing assumptions, they are equally perverse, and both must be challenged. Business units who think that being responsible for information is somehow beneath them and a job for “technical people” are making a miscalculation about the economics of information. I.T. departments who think there is a single, integrated, concept called “the business” that you can defer responsibilities to are either playing a game or burying their heads in the sand.

A quick overview of the first 30-40 years of the information technology revolution will help us understand how we got here.

Part of The Beginning and The End of Information Management.

Introduction

“The Beginning and The End of Information Management”

Information management is big news at the moment.  Put simply, information management is the strategic management of information to ensure it is captured, maintained, and used as required by your organisation’s strategic intent.  

If you’ve already been put off by the fact I used “information” and “management” in my definition of “information management”, or that I used “strategic” twice, you’re probably not going to enjoy running an information management initiative. 

I can’t think of any reason why you’d want to read this book if you aren’t trying to lead an information management initiative.  It’s not a general audience book.  But it does try to both introduce you to the concepts of information management while at the same time looking at the subject in a slightly different way.  

This book hopes to arm you with some ideas that will help you lead your initiative.  But if you’ve never been involved in an information management initiative before you might not notice when I’m trying to help you.  I’ll try, but you might still end up taking your initiative down a wrong turn and wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars.  But now you can blame me. 

The good news is these initiatives tend to take a long time, particularly when managed poorly, so by the time you’ve finished you might understand where I’m coming from.  You’ll be ready for next time at least.  At that point, just try not to come across as a know-it-all, like I fear I am now. 

There are at least three ways I view us being at both “the beginning” and “the end” of information management and therefore why I’ve included this in the title of this book.  

Firstly, I think the fact that we need information management initiatives is an anomaly.  It’s bizarre when you think about it. We all know what information is, and we use it every day. So why a special program to manage it?  Why haven’t we been naturally incorporating what we know about the economics of information into our change programs and improvement initiatives?

I think I know what happened, some of which I discuss in this book.  In brief, the discipline of general management, which was largely about telling people what to do, suddenly stopped working when information technology started being incorporated into the design of our organisations.  

While we noticed the big impacts of information technology, we didn’t notice other subtle shifts. So while general management stopped working immediately, the impact on our organisations took decades.  This 30-Year-Drift caused us to confuse “details” in general with “technical details”.  There are a lot of details to consider during an information management initiative, but they aren’t all “technical”. 

Conflating these concepts caused a drift of responsibilities into I.T.  departments that they never fully embraced. Even when I.T. departments tried to embrace these new responsibilities, other trends such as outsourcing accidentally eliminated the associated capabilities as not core to I.T.  

When we are starting an information management initiative, at “the beginning” so to speak, we must first address this drift.  

But we’re also at “the end” of this problem.  Indeed, if you are only just starting your information management initiative now you’ve already started too late.  It’s likely that your competitors are way ahead of you by this point.  This is “the end” in terms of being able to obtain any competative advantage by merely addressing this drift.  

Like all late starters, and smart second-movers, you also have an opportunity to learn from both the failures and the successes of others.  Where this book takes a different approach it is to try and help you leap-frog those who have come before you. 

Our second “beginning and end” refers to the way we think of information management frameworks.  At the beginning of your information management initiative you will adopt an information management framework.  This book includes the barest bones of such a framework (though I’d claim it is sufficient to get you started if you have nothing else).  

But in my view of how to implement an information management framework you have to think of this initial framework as something very different to the framework you will eventually build.  You need to use this generic, starting point, information management framework at “the beginning” to build your actual information management framework.  

This isn’t just a matter of customising, or picking-and-chosing elements of the framework; and this is why the initial framework doesn’t have to be particularly comprehensive.  Instead it’s about using the initial framework to generate a framework specific to the needs of your organisation.  

Notice I said “the needs of your organisation”, not “the needs of your stakeholders” or “business requirements”. I’m talking about things that are fundamental to how you operate as a business. These need to be discovered, not pushed to somebody else to define so we can tick them off a list. 

Under this approach there is a very real difference between the framework at “the beginning” and the framework at “the end”.

Thirdly, and this is personal, I’ve spent about half of my career involved in information management.  Sometimes this has been in the context of technology roles, sometimes as part of major programs and business transformations, and of course I’ve lead many information management initiatives.  

To me, I see information management as in my past.  I’m at the end of understanding our organisations as the sum of their information life-cycles.  This book represents my aging views of what I expect from the information management initiatives I encounter rather than what I’d like to actually be doing.  

But with every end comes a new beginning.  So for me this is the beginning of helping others get their information management initiatives right, and a time to look from the outside in as a consumer and stakeholder of information management initiatives as I enjoy the next phase of my career.  

I just rewatched this and it’s even better.

Talk:

Book: 12 Rules for Life

“If you have people who are not listening to you, stop talking to them”

It may well take me longer to read The Power Broker (http://amzn.to/2EQfLCi) than it took Robert A. Caro to write it, but I enjoyed this on the commute home:

Great and tragic documentary

Then this

Then this

As I’ve previously written more obtusely, all simplification must be context specific.

This means you cannot arbitrarily make something more simple – you can only make it more simple in a particular context. As such you need to be able to ask “simple for what purpose?” Or at least “simple for who?” in order to start the process of simplification.

Also, if you plan to simplify something multiple times for different contexts, and there isn’t a clear root structure with an appropriate and natural level of complexity, your multiple “simplified” views will be more complex than the natural level of complexity when they are combined.

Furthermore, I have argued that if you want to create things of enduring value you should first strive for difficulty in comprehension – that is, for complexity – in the first instance. By doing this you are giving yourself the best chance at making something of enduring value. Once you have something of enduring value you can “make it simple” by either creating the context for which it can be understood, or by creating a view of it for a particular context.

In a way, this is no different to the idea that innovative products must create their own demand. When we recount that “if I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have wanted a faster horse” Henry Ford parable we are but sighting an example of somebody working at both natural levels of complexity and the need for context specific simplification.

Cars are complex, though arguably less complex than a horse, and while the context of utility can be made as simple as faster or slower, that doesn’t simplify the complexity of either a car or a horse.

So simplification without context creates complexity. However, I’ve always maintained their are two types of simplification that are desirable when it comes to the management of our organisations. It is true that these are just examples of “context specific” simplification but I believe they deserve to be named in the context of organisational coordination and management.

Leading Simplification 

Leading simplification is simplification that occurs prior to complexity arising. Leading simplification is grounding and truely leading in the sense of “leadership”.

Leading simplification is when you can state outcomes or a vision that will remain true (or can be incrementally managed) during the process of discovering, creating, or otherwise managing complexity.

It’s an unfortunate side-effect of managerialism that the request to simplify something usually comes at the end of the process of discovering, creating, and managing complexity – rather than at the beginning. Managerialism, when it benefits managers rather than organisations, has a tendency to provide no leading simplicity but then expect the outcome to be simple / simplified.

Leading simplification is therefore a call for simplification of vision, objectives, and perhaps constraints – rather than creating an environment with a lack of leadership or a *post hoc* calling for simplification.

Reversible Simplification 

We mustn’t create intractable scenarios for ourselves. So what do we do when in the absence of leading simplification we have created undesirable complexity of the type that truely must be simplified?

The answer is “reversible simplification”. In this case we don’t create a disconnected and alternative view of the complexity and claim it a simplification. We must always ensure we can reverse the simplification and return to the complexity.

If somebody looks at the simplified view and prioritises or relates one or more components against others, this must have clear or at least clarifiable implications on the complex view of the same thing.

Where the implications create genuine simplifications these can the be circled back to all other views to alter, remove, or add as implied by the new reversible context. This happens naturally where there is a conscious desire to reduce complexity.

Disrupting Simplification

If you are familiar with the logic of disruptive approaches such as design thinking, you may think that there is a category of simplification missing from the above.

There is a type of simplification that ignores legacy. Many facilitated workshops start with the idea that they are “leaving preconceptions at the door”. Instead these take a different perspective on the problem – often based on a “customer driven” analysis.

I happen to like these approaches and believe they are an important part of the innovation process. I’ll admit I’m a little offended by the implication that some of these processes and styles of thinking are new – but that’s another discussion.

However, I don’t believe these are different from “leading” or “reversible” simplification. In fact, they are a useful combination of both and should be considered as such.

If you are “leaving preconceptions at the door” you are effectively taking away any basis for judging improvements or the amount of innovation produced by a process. If you’ve explicitly left legacy at the door, when you declare your workshop was success at the end of the session how do you know that was the case? You have effectively thrown out and disallowed anything that would allow you to make that comparison.

In this sense your simplication isn’t reversible. That is it isn’t reservable until you comprehensively test-and-learn in a comprehensive way that both produces product / outcomes and understands impacts. Which is of course exactly what happens when we are conscientious.

It is the habit of those under pressure to equate their personal understanding of something with its complexity or utility. Even something that might be understood with some additional effort or persistence of engagement is dismissed as not useful because it is not immediately understood.  If I were to evaluate the utility of an artefact such as a document that must be understood to be useful I would contrast between those artefacts that are easy to understand in the first reading with those that are only understood after multiple readings. I would make a further distinction of those items that after being understood are recognised by those who now understand them to have value.  

My preferred artefact of all of those covered by the above convolution is those artefacts that require multiple readings prior to complete understanding being attained, and then continue to have a respectful recognition of value from those who now understand them. I proposed that everybody who considers these various types of artefacts would have the same preference.

There is a temptation to prefer the artefacts that are fully understood on their first reading and that are also then on immediately first consuming them recognised as having enduring value. However, I believe this category of artefacts only reveal truth that those consuming are ready to consume. For those not ready they fall into my first preferred category and require subsequent readings prior to being fully understood and appriciated.  

This tempting exception is in fact merely an example of a general case. Creating an artefact that cannot be fully comprehended on the first reading should be the intention in all cases. Simplicity is context specific. Given the number of possible contexts is infinite it is impossible to make something simple for all contexts simultaneously. 

In all cases an artefact that cannot be comprehended on its first consumption is either incomprehensible, requires further knowledge to be acquired by those consuming it before it is appreciated, or requires a change in the underlying values or beliefs of those consuming it before it can be accepted as having value. 

The initial intention of incomprehensibility is of course no guarantee of the second criteria – which is to produce artefacts considered to have enduring value by those who understand them. However, for those who understand it to consider it to have enduring value it must have some relationship to the future knowledge, beliefs, and values of those who consume it. 

Not all artefacts created with the intention of being incomprehensible will have enduring value to those who understand them. But I believe those created with the intention of being only comprehensible on multiple consumptions will have a better chance of having enduring value than those created with the intention of non-contextualised simplicity. As non-contextualised simplistically doesn’t exist, aiming for it will have unintended consequences. 

There is no path that begins with being initially comprehensible on first consumption that can create enduring value without itself including all possible differences in knowledge, beliefs, and values that might be reflected between subsequent consumptions or in the path to understanding or appreciating the artefact’s enduring value.

Matthew’s law might therefore be that non-specific simplification always reduces enduring value.  

The solution is reversible simplification or leading simplification. These represent a disciplined simplification that retains traceability to the original complexity, or a tentative pre simplification more closely resembling an hypothesis. 

And yet:

“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” – H. L. Mencken