We’ve been reading Doug Laney’s new book Infonomics. You should too! It’s available on Amazon here. Doug is a vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner’s Chief Data Officer practice. He knows what he’s talking about when it comes to understanding the value of information.
Doug lays down a challenge to organisations large and small: “You say that Information is one of your most important assets… but do you actually treat it like it is?” Few organisations do!
Infonomics and the Curse of Information
Infonomics sets out to address the curse of Information:
- If something can’t be valued it isn’t valuable
- If it isn’t valuable, it isn’t investible
- And if it isn’t investible, it’s not improvable
But it’s worse than that with information. That inability to value information means that we flounder around for something else to invest in. All too often, that’s the technology of information. Which is moving into the cloud and is increasingly challenging to value. And anyway, the technology is merely the enabler of information.
Perhaps we invest in the information applications which deliver to business outcomes? Which means that the ancient old Fortran server is still lurking in the background, with technicians too scared to touch it in case it breaks. And business leaders who simply don’t understand the value of information and processes hosted on this ancient piece of technology.
Too many organisations just keep repeating the mantra about valuable information without ever doing anything about it! Which is like deciding to throw the organisation into reverse and give competitors free rein.
Information Waste
LINQ customers are doing something about it. They’re using the LINQ platform to trace the flow of information through their organisation. They also use LINQ to record the business value and costs associated with that flow. And it’s paying off.
At a subscription start point of under $20,000, LINQ customers are typically identifying at least $200k in Information Waste in the first 3 months. And that’s just the beginning.
Information Waste takes many forms:
- Information Supply Chains that have no business value – “we process this information because that’s what we’ve always done”
- Rework – the cost of failing to deliver business value right the first time
- Duplication – capturing and processing the same high value sources multiple times
- Investing in the wrong things – investing in applications instead of high-value sources.
- Delays in processing – latency delaying high-value, time-dependent business outcomes
- Regulatory breaches – failure to recognise the value of compliance
Note that low business value is the objective determinant of Information waste.
Once our customers have got over the excitement of such a fast return on investment, they then realise something more important about their ability to recognise value: Low value triggers cost saving; high value deserves improvement.
And because LINQ captures information flow so quickly, you can achieve improvement by reassigning resources from low-value to high value activities. You can also initiate improvement by looking at the potential reuse of existing source data to support new and valuable information outputs. Above all, LINQ creates the time to seek further improvement.
Change Decision Support
Which then triggers another realisation: LINQ is performing a critical change decision support function. So LINQ’s most mature customers are using LINQ as their go-to system for change prioritisation and sequencing. That’s because cost, value & maturity are persisted in the organisation’s current state.
LINQ balances the agility of incremental improvements in information flow with the vision of business transformation. Which allows good change to become continuous change.
Which is a long-winded way of saying “Infonomics rocks: let’s do it!”
We figure that if you’ve read to this point, you probably deserve a reward! So we’re giving away 100 free Kindle copies of Doug’s book. All we ask is that you provide your contact details… if you’re interested, please visit www.linq.it/infonomics. Sorry, you’re too late! Kindle copies on Amazon are less than USD10!
Alternatively, if you’ve already read Doug’s book and want to start taking action, you can book a LINQ demo here