When I occasionally re-read articles I penned back in 2009 or 2010, I’m often struck that – no matter how many things have undeniably changed over the intervening years in the data arena – there are some seemingly eternal verities. For example, it’s never just about the technology and indeed it’s seldom even predominantly about the technology [1]. True then, true now. These articles have a certain timeless quality to them. This is not that sort of article…
This is an article written at a certain time and in certain circumstances. I fervently hope that it rapidly becomes an anachronism.
Here and now, in late March 2020, many of us are adjusting to working from home for the first time on an extended basis [2]. In talking to friends and associates, this can be a difficult transition. Humans are inherently social animals and limiting our social interactions can be injurious to mental health. Fortunately, people also seem to be coming up with creative ways to stay in touch and the array of tools at our disposal to do this has never been greater.
In this piece, I wanted to talk about my first experience of extended home working. In my last article, Data Strategy Creation – A Roadmap, I hopefully gave some sense of the complexities involved in developing a commercially focussed Data Strategy. Well my task while home working for the first time was to do just that!
Back then, I ended up being successful without the benefit of more modern communications facilities, which is hopefully a helpful to learn for people today. Not only can you get by when working from home, you can take on some types of complicated work and do it well.
To provide some more colour, let’s go back to 2007 / 2008. Even in the midst of what was then obviously the Dark Ages, we did have email and even the Internet, but to be honest the “revolutionary” technology I used most often was well over a hundred years old at that point, let me introduce you to it…
First some context. I had successfully developed and then executed a Data Strategy for the European operations of a leading Global General Insurer. This work had played a pivotal role in returning the organisation to profitability following record losses. On the back of this, I was promoted to also be accountable for Data across the organisation’s businesses in Asia / Pacific, Canada and Latin America. The span of my new responsibilities is shown further down the page.
My first task was to develop an International Data Strategy. As per the framework that I began to develop as part of this assignment, I needed to speak to a lot of people, both business and technical. I needed to understand what was different about Insurance Markets as diverse as China and Brasil. I needed to understand a systems and data landscape spanning five continents. And – importantly – I needed to establish and then build on personal relationships with a lot of different people from different cultures in different locations. There was also the minor issue of time zones to be dealt with. Then I like a challenge.
My transition to home working in this role was not driven by the type of deadly pathogen that we currently face, but by more quotidian considerations. The work I was initially doing primarily related to the activities tagged as 1.3 Business Interviews and 1.5 Technical Staff Discussions in my Data Strategy framework. Relative to this, I found that I was speaking to Singapore (where there was a team of data developers as well as several stakeholders) at 6am or even earlier; seguing to my continuing European responsibilities not long after; then had Latin and North America come on stream in the afternoon, going through until late; and sometimes picking things up with Australia or Asia Pacific locations at 11pm or midnight.
I was often writing up notes straight after meetings, or comparing them to previous ones looking for commonalities and teasing out themes. Because of this, there was not a lot of time for a commute to central London. Equally as I was on the ‘phone or email all of the time, there was little need for me to go into the office. So working from home became my “new normal”.
I could of course go into the office if I wanted to. It was also possible to go out and have a meal with my wife. Finally, I was not worried about getting sick or this happening to my family. So things were not so difficult as they are today. It did however take me some time to adjust to these different arrangements. One thing I learnt was that I couldn’t work solidly every day from 6am to midnight – an amazing revelation I realise. Given the extended nature of my day, I had to build breaks in.
As I was working well in excess of my contractual hours, if a gap opened up in my day, I would do things like cycle to Regent’s Park and do laps of the outer circle. A major activity for me at the time was rock climbing and so I would take a break and work out on a training aid called a fingerboard, which we had two of (see above). Trying to hang from this by two fingers tended to clear the mind.
To return to the work, there were elements of this that blunted any feeling of isolation. Of course I ran my notes past the people interviewed, a second point of interaction. I also found a handful of people in each territory who were very positive about driving change through enhanced information. With these I held ongoing chats, discussing the views of their colleagues, contrasting these to those of other people around the organisation, sharing preliminary findings and nascent ideas for moving forward, getting their feedback on all of this. As well as helping me to have sounding boards for my ideas and getting alternative input, this was also great for building relationships; something that is harder over the ‘phone, but – as I found – far from impossible. However, it did require effort and, importantly, that effort needed to be sustained.
Something I thankfully figured out quite early was that email was not enough. Even with busy people on the other side of the world, perhaps particularly with busy people on the other side of the world, it was worth arranging time to talk. Despite the efficiency and convenience of email, I made a point of also speaking and of religiously rearranging any chats that fell through. Sometimes I wanted to just drop a colleague an email, but I tried to resist the temptation. In retrospect I think this approach helped a lot – on both ends of the ‘phone line.
Over time my work gradually shifted from gathering data to analysing and synthesising it, that is figuring out what the elements of the Data Strategy should be, for example current and future states. This is never an abrupt change, you start to analyse as soon as you have done a handful of interviews, but this work ramps up as more and more interviews are ticked off. Another thing that I found was, rather than sending people a whole slide deck and inviting comments, sharing one slide / exhibit at a time worked better. That way you assemble a deck out of agreed components and also have further opportunities for telephone interaction. If you are careful enough with structuring your individual slides, then the overall story can take care of itself, or at least require minimal “connective tissue” to be woven around it.
I won’t go into every aspect of this Data Strategy work, as the point of this article is instead to focus on the working from home element. However it is worth summarising the eventual number of interviews I held and documented:
I have no idea how many ‘phone calls that equated to, but it must have been an awful lot. Most of these were carried out over the initial three-month period, with a few stragglers picked up later in parallel with rounding out the Data Strategy. The whole exercise consumed a little under six months, with the back of the work broken in slightly more than four.
In closing, the Data Strategy I developed was adopted and the international data architecture that was later rolled out remains in place today; a testament to both the work done by the development teams, but also – I hope – to my vision. Since then, I have carried out a number of similar international exercises, though not always with the working from home component. I found the lessons I learned in that initial period invaluable. For example, I use many of the the approaches I developed in 2007 / 2008 in my work today as well.
So the closing message is that things are obviously far from normal right now. But – as challenging as working from home may seem – it is possible to be productive and also to lift your eyes above keeping the business running in order to contemplate more complicated transformation activities. I hope that this knowledge is of some help to those grappling, as I did years ago, with “the new normal”.
If – despite current circumstances – you need to develop a Data Strategy and would like some help, then please get in contact via the form provided. You can also speak to us on +44 (0) 20 8895 6826.
I of course appreciate that many people do not have this option due to the type of work that they do. I also appreciate that many unfortunate people will have no work in current circumstances.
Data Strategy creation is one of the main pieces of work that I have been engaged in over the last decade [1]. In my last article, Measuring Maturity, I wrote about Data Maturity and how this relates to both Data Strategy and a Data Capability Review. Here I wanted to step back and look at the big picture.
The exhibit above is one that I use to chart my work in Data Strategy development [2]. An obvious thing to say upfront is that this is not a trivial exercise to embark on. There are many different interrelated activities, each one of which requires experience and expertise in both what makes businesses tick and the types of Data-related capabilities and organisation designs that can better support this. These need to be woven together to form the fabric of a Data Strategy and to deliver several other more detailed supporting documents, such as Data Roadmaps, or Cost / Benefit Analyses.
I tend to often tag Data Strategy with the adjective “commercial” and commercial awareness is for me what makes the difference between a Data Technology Strategy and a true Data Strategy. The latter has to be imbued with real commercial benefits being delivered.
Several of the activities in the diagram are looked at in greater detail in my trilogy on strategy development that starts with Forming an Information Strategy: Part I – General Strategy. I have also added some new areas to my approach since writing these articles back in 2014. As previously trailed, I will be penning a more comprehensive piece on Data Strategies in coming months.
I find Data Strategy creation a very rewarding process. Turning this into Data Capabilities that add business value is even more stimulating.
Having helped 10 organisations to develop their Data Strategies, the above activities are second nature to me. There is also a logical flow (mostly from left to right) and the various elements come together like the plot of a well-written book to yield the actual Data Strategy on the far right.
However I can appreciate that the complexity and reach of a Data Strategy exercise may seem rather daunting to someone looking at the area for the first time. In response to such a feeling, I’d suggest taking a leaf out of what used to be my main leisure activity, rock climbing [3]. I am a pretty experienced rock climber, but if I wanted to get into some unfamiliar aspect of the sport – say Alpinism – then I would make sure to hire a guide; someone whose experience and expertise I could rely upon and from whom I could also learn.
In my opinion, Data Strategy is an area in which such a guide is also indispensable.
Addendum
It was rightly pointed out by one of my associates, Andrew Willimott, that the above roadmap above does not explicitly reference Business Strategy. This is an very important point.
Here is an excerpt from some comments I made on this subject on Quora only the other day:
A sound commercially-focussed Data Strategy must be tailored to a specific organisation, the markets they operate in, the products or services they sell, the competitive landscape, their current Data Capabilities and – most importantly – their overarching business strategy.
I had this area implicitly covered by a combination of 1.2 Documentation Review and 1.3 Business Interviews, but I agree that the connection should be more explicit. The diagrams have now been revised accordingly with thanks to Andrew.
If you would like to better understand any aspect of the Data Strategy creation process, then please get in contact via the form provided. You can also speak to us on +44 (0) 20 8895 6826.
Notes
[1]
Often followed on by then helping to get the execution of the Data Strategy going.
[2]
I also use cut-down versions to play back progress to clients.
In the thirteen years that have passed since the beginning of 2007, I have helped ten organisations to develop commercially-focused Data Strategies [1]. I last wrote about the process of creating a Data Strategy back in 2014 and – with the many changes that the field has seen since then – am overdue publishing an update, so watch this space [2]. However, in this initial article, I wanted to to focus on one tool that I have used as part of my Data Strategy engagements; a Data Maturity Model.
A key element of developing any type of strategy is knowing where you are now and the pros and cons associated with this. I used to talk about carrying out a Situational Analysis of Data Capabilities, nowadays I am more likely to refer to a Data Capability Review. I make such reviews with respect to my own Data Capability Framework, which I introduced to the public in 2019 via A Simple Data Capability Framework.
Typically I break each of the areas appearing in boxes above into sub-areas, score the organisation against these, roll the results back up and present them back to the client with accompanying commentary; normally also including some sort of benchmark for comparison [3].
A Data Maturity Model is simply one way of presenting the outcome of a Data Capability Review; it has the nice feature of also pointing the way to the future. Such a model presents a series of states into which an organisation may fall with respect to its data. These are generally arranged in order, with the least beneficial state at the bottom and the most beneficial at the top. Data Maturity Models often adopt visual metaphors like ladders, or curves arching upwards, or – as I do myself – a flight of stairs. All of these metaphors – not so subtly – suggest ascending to a high state of being.
The various levels of Data Maturity appear on the left, ranging from Disorder to Advanced and graded – in a way reminiscent of exams – between the lowest score of E and the highest of A. To the right of the diagram is the aforementioned “staircase”. Each “step” describes attributes of an organisation with the given level of Data Maturity. Here there is an explicit connection to the Data Capability Framework. The six numbered areas that appear in the Framework also appear in each “step” of the Model (and are listed in the Key); together with a brief description of the state of each Data Capability at the given level of Data Maturity. Obviously things improve as you climb up the “stairs”.
Of course organisations may be at a more advanced stage with respect to Data Controls than they are with Analytics. Equally one division or geographic territory might be at a different level with its Information than another. Nevertheless I generally find it useful to place an entire organisation somewhere on the flight of stairs, leaving a more detailed assessment to the actual Data Capability Review; such an approach tends to also resonate with clients.
So, supposing a given organisation is at level “D – Emergent”, an obvious question is where should it aspire to be instead? In my experience, not all organisations need to be at level “A – Advanced”. It may be that a solid “B – Basic” (or perhaps B+ splitting the difference) is a better target. Much as Einstein may have said that everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler [4], Data Maturity should be as great as necessary, but no greater; over-engineering has been the downfall of many a Data Transformation Programme.
Of course, while I attempt to introduce some scientific rigour and consistency into both my Data Capability Reviews and the resulting Data Maturity Assessments, there is also an element of judgement to be applied; in many ways it is this judgement that I am actually paid to provide. When opining on an organisations state, I tend to lay the groundwork by first playing back what its employees say about this area (including the Executives that I am typically presenting my findings to). Most typically my own findings are fairly in line with what the average person says, but perhaps in general a bit less positive. Given my extensive work implementaing modern Data Architectures that deliver positive commercial outcomes, this is not a surprising state of affairs.
If a hypothetical organisation is at level “D – Emergent”, then the Model’s description of the next level up, “C – Transitional”, can provide strong pointers as to some of the activities that need to be undertaken in order to ratchet up Data Maturity one notch. The same goes for if more of a stepped-change to say, “B – Basic” is required. Initial ideas for improvement can be further buttressed by more granular Data Capability Review findings. The two areas should be mutually reinforcing.
One thing that I have found very useful is to revisit the area of Data Maturity after, for example, a year working on the area. If the organisation has scaled another step, or is at least embarked on the climb and making progress, this can be evidence of the success of the approach I have recommended and can also have a motivational effect.
As with many things, where you are with respect to Data Maturity is probably less important than your direction of travel.
If you would like to learn more about Data Maturity Models, or want to better understand how mature the data capabilities of your organisation are, then please get in touch, via the form provided. You can also speak to us on +44 (0) 20 8895 6826.
Notes
[1]
In case you were wondering, much of the rest of the time has been spent executing these Data Strategies, or at least getting the execution in motion. Having said that, I also did a lot of other stuff as per: Experience at different Organisations.
I’ll be covering this area in greater detail in the forthcoming article I mentioned in the introductory paragraph.
[4]
There is actually very significant doubt that he actually ever uttered or wrote those words. However, in 1933, he did deliver a lecture which touched on similar themes. The closest that the great man came to saying the words attributed to him was:
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
“On the Method of Theoretical Physics” the Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford, June 10, 1933.
This article is the final of three which address how to formulate an Information Strategy. I have written a number of other articles which touch on this subject [1] and have also spoken about the topic [2]. However I realised that I had never posted an in-depth review of this important area. This series of articles seeks to remedy this omission.
The first article, Part I – General Strategy, explored the nature of strategy, laid some foundations and presented a framework of questions which will need to be answered in order to formulate any general strategy. The second, Part II – Situational Analysis, explained how to adapt the first element of this general framework – The Situational Analysis – to creating an Information Strategy. In Part I, I likened formulating an Information Strategy to a journey, Part III – Completing the Strategy sees us reaching the destination by working through the rest of the general framework and showing how this can be used to produce a fully-formed Information Strategy.
As with all of my other articles, this essay is not intended as a recipe for success, a set of instructions which – if slavishly followed – will guarantee the desired outcome. Instead the reader is invited to view the following as a set of observations based on what I have learnt during a career in which the development of both Information Strategies and technology strategies in general have played a major role.
I closed Part I of this series by presenting a set of questions, the answers to which will facilitate the formation of any strategy. These have a geographic / journey theme and are as follows:
Where are we?
Where do we want to be instead and why?
How do we get there, how long will it take and what will it cost?
Will the trip be worth it?
What else can we do along the way?
Part II explained the process of answering question 1 through the medium of a Situational Analysis. It is worth pointing out at this juncture that the Situational Analysis will also naturally form the first phase of the more lengthy process of gathering and analysing business requirements. For the purposes of the rest of this article, when such requirements are mentioned, they are taken as being the embryonic ones captured as part of the Situational Analysis.
In this final article I will focus on how to approach obtaining answers to questions 2 to 5. Having spent quite some time considering question 1 in the previous chapter, the content here will be somewhat briefer for the remaining questions; not least as I have covered some of this territory in earlier articles [3].
2. Where do we want to be instead and why?
My thoughts here split into two sub-sections. The second, What does Good look like?, is (as will be obvious from the title) more forward looking than backward. It covers reasons why the destination may be worth the journey. The first is more to do with why staying in the current location may not be a great idea [4]. However, one motivation for not staying put is that somewhere else may well be better. For this reason, there is not definitive border between these two sub-sections and it will be evident from the text that they instead bleed into each other.
2a. Drivers for Change
People often say that the gains that result from Information Programmes are intangible. Of course some may indeed be fairly intangible, but even the most ephemeral of these will not be entirely immune from some sort of valuation. Other benefits, when examined closely enough, can turn out to be surprisingly tangible [5]. In making a case for change (and of course the expenditure associated with this) it is good to try to have a balance of tangible and intangible factors. Here is a selection which may be applicable:
Internal IT drivers
These often centre around both the cost and confusion associated with a fragmented and inconsistent Information Landscape; something which, even as we head in to 2015, is still not atypical.
Opportunity costs may arise from an inability to combine data from different repositories or to roll up data to cover an entire organisation.
There is also a case to be made here around things like the licensing costs that result from having too many information repositories and too many tools being used to access them.
However, the cost of remediating such fragmentation can often appear in the shape of additional IT headcount devoted to maintaining a complex landscape and additional business headcount devoted to remediating information shortcomings.
Productivity gains
Less number crunching, more business-focussed analysis. Often an organisation’s most highly qualified (and highly paid) staff can spend much of their time repeating quotidian tasks that computers could do far more reliably. Freeing up such able and creative people to add more business value should be an objective and should have benefits.
At one company I estimated that teams would spend 5-7 days assembling the information necessary to support a meeting with one of a number of key business partners or a major client; our goal became to provide the same information effectively instantaneously; these types of benefits can be costed and also tend to resonate with business stakeholders.
Increasing sales / improving profitability
All information programmes (indeed most any business activity) should be dedicated to increasing profitability of course. In some specific industries the leverage of high-quality information is more readily associated with profitability than others. However, with enough time spent understanding the dynamics of an organisation, I would suggest that it is possible to make this linkage in a credible manner in pretty much any industry sector.
With respect to sales, sometimes if you want to increase say cross-selling, a very effective way is simply to measure it, maybe by department and salesperson. If there is some reliable way to track this, improvements in cross-selling will inevitably follow.
Mitigating operational risk
More reliable, unbiased and transparent production of information can address a number of operational risks; what these are specifically will vary from organisation to organisation.
However, most years see some organisation or another have to restate their results – there have been cases where adding two figures rather than subtracting them has led to a later restatement. Cases can often be built around the specific pain points in an organisation, or sometimes even near misses that were caught at the 11th hour.
Equally the cost of checking and re-checking figures before publication can be extremely high.
It is also generally worth asking business users what value they would ascribe to improved information, for example what things could they do under new arrangements that they cannot do now? It is important here that any benefits – and in particular any ones which prove to be intangible – are expressed in business language, not technical jargon.
2b. What does Good look like?
Answering this question is predicated on both experience of successful information improvement programmes and a degree of knowledge about the general information market. There are two main elements here, what does good look like technically and what does it look like from a process / people perspective.
To cover the technical first, this is the simpler area, not least as we have understood how to develop robust, flexible and highly-performing information architectures for at least 15 years.
The basics are shown in the diagram above [6]. Questions to consider here include:
What would a new information architecture look like?
What are the characteristics of the new which would indicate that it is an improvement on the old, can these be articulated to non-technical people?
What are required elements and how do they relate to the high-level needs captured in the Situational Analysis?
How does the proposed architecture relate to incumbent technologies and current staff skills?
Can any elements of existing information provision be leveraged, either temporarily or on an ongoing basis?
What has worked for other organisations and why would this be pertinent to the organisation in question?
Are any new developments in technology pertinent?
Arguably the more important area is the non-technical. Here there is a range of items to consider, some of which are captured in the following exhibit [7]:
I could spend an separate set of articles commenting on the elements of the above diagram; indeed I already have and interested readers are directed to the footnotes for links to some of these [8]. However it is worth pointing out the critical role to be played by both user education (a more apt phrase than training) and formal Data Governance. Also certain elements of information tend to work well when they sit within a regular business process; such as a monthly or quarterly review of specific aspects of results and future projections.
3. How do we get there, how long will it take and what will it cost?
3a. Outline an Indicative Programme of Work
I am not going to offer Programme Planning 101 here, but briefly the first step in putting together an indicative programme of work is to decompose the overall journey into chunks, each of which can then be estimated. Each chunk should cover a group of reports / analyses and include activities from requirements gathering through to testing and finally deployment [9]. For the purposes of an indicative programme within a strategy document, the strategist can rely upon both information gathered in the Situational Analysis and their own experience of how to best decompose such work. Ultimately the size and number of the chunks should be dictated by business need, but at this stage estimates can be based upon experience and reasonable assumptions.
It is important that each chunk (or sub-chunk) delivers value and offers an opportunity for the approach and progress to be reviewed. A further factor to consider when estimating these chunks is that they should be delivered at a pace which allows them to be properly digested by users; resource allocations should reflect this. For each chunk the strategist should consider the type and quantum of resource required and the timing with which these are applied.
The indicative programme plan should also include a first phase which relates to reviewing the plan itself. Forming a strategy involves less people than running a programme. Even if initial estimation is carried out very diligently, it is likely that further issues will emerge once more detailed work later commences. As the information programme team ramps up, it is important that time is allocated for new team members to kick the tyres on the plan and make recommendations for improvement.
3b. How much will it cost?
A big element of cost estimates will be a by-product of the indicative programme plan, which will cover programme duration and the amount of resource required at different points. Some further questions to consider when looking to catalogue costs include the following:
What are baseline costs for current information provision?
To what degree to these need to be incurred in parallel to an information improvement programme, are there ways to reduce these legacy costs to free up funds for the central programme?
What transitional costs are needed to execute the Information Strategy?
Hardware and software: is change necessary?
People: what is the best balance between internal, contract and outsourced resources, to what degree can existing staff be leveraged without compromising their current responsibilities?
How will costs vary by programme phase, will these taper as elements of older information systems are replaced by new facilities?
Can costs be reduced by having people play different roles at different points in the programme?
What costs will be ongoing once the strategy has been executed?
How do these compare to the current baseline?
Sometimes one aim of an Information Strategy will be to reduce to cost of ongoing support and maintenance, if so, how will this be achieved and how will any transition be managed?
A consideration here is whether the most important thing is to maximise speed of delivery or minimise risk? Things that will reduce risk could include: initial exploratory phases; starting with a small number of programme resources and increasing these based only on success; and instigating appropriate governance processes. However each of these will also increase duration and therefore cost. In some areas a trade off will be necessary and which side of these equations is more important will vary from organisation to organisation.
4. Will the trip be worth it?
Answering parts of question 2 will help with getting a handle on potential benefits of executing an Information Strategy. Work on question 3 will get us an idea of the timeframes and costs involved. There is a need to combine the two of these into a cost / benefit analysis. This should be an honest and transparent assessment of the potential payback of adopting the Information Strategy. Given that most Information Strategies will take more than a year to implement and that benefits may equally be realised on an ongoing basis, it will generally make sense to look at figures over a 3-5 year period. It may be possible to draw up a quasi-P&L statement showing the impact of adopting the strategy, such an approach can resonate with senior stakeholders.
Points to recall and questions to consider here include:
Costs will emerge from the Indicative Programme Plan, but remember the ongoing costs of maintaining existing information capabilities.
As with most initiatives, the benefits of information programmes split into tangible and intangible components:
Where possible make benefits tangible even if this requires a degree of guesstimation [10].
Remember that many supposed intangibles can be estimated with some thought.
What benefits have other companies seen from similar programmes, particularly ones in the same industry sector?
Is it possible to perform “what if?” scenarios with current and future capabilities; could better information could have led to better outcomes? [11]
Ask business people to estimate the impact of better information.
Intangible benefits resonate where they are expressed in clear business language, not IT speak.
It should be borne in mind here that the cost / benefit analysis may not add up. If this is the case, then either a less expensive approach is more suitable for the company, or the potential benefits need to be looked at again. Where progress can genuinely not be made on either of these areas, the responsible strategist will acknowledge that doing nothing may well be the logical approach for the organisation in question.
5. What else can we do along the way?
Finally, it is worth noting that short-term tactical deliveries can strongly support a strategy [12]. Interim work can meet urgent business needs in a timely manner. This is a substantial benefit in itself and also evidences progress in the area of improving information capabilities. It also demonstrates that that the programme team understands commercial pressures. This type of work is also complementary in that it can be used to:
Validate some elements of the cost / benefit analysis.
Round out requirements gathering.
Highlight any areas which have been overlooked.
Provide invaluable deployment and training experience, which can be leveraged for the implementation of more strategic capabilities.
It can also be useful make mistakes early and with small deliverables, not later with major ones. For these reasons, it is suggested that any Information Strategy should embrace “throw away” work. However this should be reflected in the overall programme plan and resources should be specifically allocated to this area. If this is not done, then tactical work can easily overwhelm the team and prevent progress on more strategic areas from being made; generally a death knell for a programme.
A Recap of the Main Points
Carry out a Situational Analysis.
As part of this, start the process of capturing High-level Business Requirements.
Establish Drivers for Change, what benefits can be realised by better information, or by producing information in a better way?
Ask “What Does Good Look Like?”, from both a technical and a process / people point of view.
Develop an Indicative Programme of Work with realistic resource estimates and durations.
Estimate Current, Transitional and Ongoing Costs.
Itemise some of the major Interim Deliverables.
Create a Cost / Benefits Analysis.
Bringing everything together
There is a need to take the detailed work described over the course of the last three articles and the documentation which has been created as part of the process and to distill these down into a format that is digestible by senior management. There is no silver bullet here, summarising screeds of detail in a way that preserves the main points and presents them in a way that resonates is not easy. It takes judgement, an understanding of how businesses operate and strong analytical, writing and often diagrammatic skills. These will not be acquired by reading a blog article, but by honing experience and expertise over many years of work. To an extent, producing relevant and cogent summaries is where good IT professionals earn their money.
Unfortunately, at the time of writing, there is no book entitled Summarising Complex Issues for Dummies[13], [14].
This article and its two predecessors have been akin to listing the ingredients required to make a complex meal. While it is difficult to make great food without good ingredients or with some key spice missing, these things are not sufficient to ensure culinary excellence; what is also needed is a competent chef [15]. I cook a lot myself and, whenever I try a recipe for the first time, it can be a bit fraught. Sometimes I don’t get all of the elements of the meal ready at the same time, sometimes while I’m paying attention to reading the instructions for one part, another part boils over, or gets burnt. These problems with cooking tend dissipate with repetition. In the same way, what is generally needed in developing a sound Information Strategy is the equivalents great ingredients, a competent chef and an experienced one as well.
– this series of articles presents a specific example drawn from Insurance, but the general approach can be adapted to fit other industry sectors
[6]
This is an expanded version of the diagram I posted as part of Using multiple business intelligence tools in an implementation – Part I back in May 2009. I have elided details such as the fine structure of the warehouse (staging, relational, multidimensional etc.), master data sources and also which parts of it are accessed by different tools and different types of users. In a severe breach with the traditional IT approach, I have also left some arrows out.
[7]
This is an updated version of an exhibit I put together working with an actuarial colleague back in 2001, early in my journey into information improvement programmes.
[8]
These include my trilogy on the change management aspects of information programmes:
Sometimes the first level of decomposition will need to be broken up into further and smaller chunks with this process iterating until the strategist reaches tasks which they are happy to estimate with a degree of certainty.
[10]
It may make sense to have different versions of the cost / benefit analysis, more conservative ones including only the most tangible benefits and more aggressive ones taking in to account benefits which have to be somewhat less certain.
This article is the second of three which address how to formulate an Information Strategy. I have written a number of other articles which touch on this subject[1] and have also spoken about the topic[2]. However I realised that I had never posted an in-depth review of this important area. This series of articles seeks to remedy this omission.
The first article, Part I – General Strategy, explored the nature of strategy, laid some foundations and presented a framework of questions which will need to be answered in order to formulate any general strategy. This chapter, Part II – Situational Analysis, explains how to adapt the first element of this general framework – The Situational Analysis – to creating an Information Strategy. In Part I, I likened formulating an Information Strategy to a journey, Part III – Completing the Strategy sees us reaching the destination by working through the rest of the general framework and showing how this can be used to produce a fully-formed Information Strategy.
As with all of my other articles, this essay is not intended as a recipe for success, a set of instructions which – if slavishly followed – will guarantee the desired outcome. Instead the reader is invited to view the following as a set of observations based on what I have learnt during a career in which the development of both Information Strategies and technology strategies in general have played a major role.
A Recap of the Strategic Framework
I closed Part I of this series by presenting a set of questions, the answers to which will facilitate the formation of any strategy. These have a geographic / journey theme and are as follows:
Where are we?
Where do we want to be instead and why?
How do we get there, how long will it take and what will it cost?
Will the trip be worth it?
What else can we do along the way?
In this article I will focus on how to answer the first question, Where are we? This is the province of a Situational Analysis. I will now move on from general strategy and begin to be specific about how to develop a Situational Analysis in the context of an overall Information Strategy.
But first a caveat: if the last article was prose-heavy, this one is question-heavy; the reader is warned!
Where are we? The anatomy of an Information Strategy’s Situational Analysis
If we take this question and, instead of aiming to plot our celestial coordinates, look to consider what it would mean in the context of an Information Strategy, then a number of further questions arise. Here are just a few examples of the types of questions that the strategist should investigate, broken down into five areas:
Business-focussed questions
What do business people use current information to do?
In their opinion, is current information adequate for this task and if not in what ways is it inadequate?
Are there any things that business people would like to do with information, but where the figures don’t exist or are not easily accessible?
How reliable and trusted is existing information, is it complete, accurate and suitably up-to-date?
If there are gaps in information provision, what are these and what is the impact of missing data?
How consistent is information provision, are business entities and calculated figures ambiguously labeled and can you get different answers to the same question in different places?
Is existing information available at the level that different people need, e.g. by department, country, customer, team or at at a transactional level?
Are there areas where business people believe that data is available, but no facilities exist to access this?
What is the extent of End User Computing, is this at an appropriate level and, if not, is poor information provision a driver for work in this area?
Related to this, are the needs of analytical staff catered for, or are information facilities targeted mostly at management reporting only?
How easy do business people view it as being to get changes made to information facilities, or to get access to the sort of ad hoc data sets necessary to support many business processes?
What training have business people received, what is the general level of awareness of existing information facilities and how easy is it for people to find what they need?
How intuitive are existing information facilities and how well-structured are menus which provide access to these?
Is current information provision something that is an indispensable part of getting work done, or at best an afterthought?
Design questions
How were existing information facilities created, who designed and built them and what level of business input was involved?
What are the key technical design components of the overall information architecture and how do they relate to each other?
If there is more than one existing information architecture (e.g. in different geographic locations or different business units), what are the differences between them?
How many different tools are used in various layers of the information architecture? E.g.
Databases
Extract Transform Load tools
Multidimensional data stores
Reporting and Analysis tools
Data Visualisation tools
Dashboard tools
Tools to provide information to applications or web-portals
What has been the role of data modeling in designing and developing information facilities?
If there is a target data model for the information facilities, is this fit for purpose and does it match business needs?
Has a business glossary been developed in parallel to the design of the information capabilities and if so is this linked to reporting layers?
What is the approach to master data and how is this working?
Technical questions
What are the key source systems and what are their types, are these integrated with each other in any way?
How does data flow between source systems?
Is there redundancy of data and can similar datasets in different systems get out of synch with each other, if so which are the master records?
How robust are information facilities, do they suffer outages, if so how often and what are the causes?
Are any issues experienced in making changes to information facilities, either extended development time, or post-implementation failures?
Are there similar issues related to the time taken to fix information facilities when they go wrong?
Are various development tools integrated with each other in a way that helps developers and makes code more rigourous?
How are errors in input data handled and how robust are information facilities in the face of these challenges?
How well-optimised is the regular conversion of data into information?
How well do information facilities cope with changes to business entities (e.g. the merger of two customers)?
Is the IT infrastructure(s) underpinning information facilities suitable for current data volumes, what about future data volumes?
Is there a need for redundancy in the IT infrastructure supporting information facilities, if so, how is this delivered?
Are suitable arrangements in place for disaster recovery?
Process questions
Is there an overall development methodology applied to the creation of information facilities?[3]
If so, is it adhered to and is it fit for purpose?
What controls are applied to the development of new code and data structures?
How are requests for new facilities estimated and prioritised?
How do business requirements get translated into what developers actually do and is this process working?
Is the level, content and completeness of documentation suitable, is it up-to-date and readily accessible to all team members?
What is the approach to testing new information facilities?
Are there any formal arrangements for Data Governance and any initiatives to drive improvements in data quality?
How are day-to-day support and operational matters dealt with and by whom?
Information Team questions
Is there a single Information Team or many, if many, how do they collaborate and share best practice?
What is the demand for work required of the existing team(s) and how does this relate to their capacity for delivery?
What are the skills of current team members and how do these complement each other?
Are there any obvious skill gaps or important missing roles?
How do information people relate to other parts of IT and to their business colleagues?
How is the information team(s) viewed by their stakeholders in terms of capability, knowledge and attitude?
An Approach to Geolocation
So that’s a long list of questions[4], to add to the list: what is the best way of answering them? Of course it may be that there is existing documentation which can help in some areas, however the majority of questions are going to be answered via the expedient of talking to people. While this may appear to be a simple approach, if these discussions are going to result in an accurate and relevant Situational Analysis, then how to proceed needs to be thought about up-front and work needs to be properly structured.
Business conversations
A challenge here is the range and number of people[5]. It is of course crucial to start with the people who consume information. These discussions would ideally allow the strategist to get a feeling for what different business people do and how they do it. This would cover their products/services, the markets that they operate in and the competitive landscape they face. With some idea of these matters established, the next item is their needs for information and how well these are met at present. Together feedback in these areas will begin to help to shape answers to some of the business-focussed questions referenced above (and to provide pointers to guide investigations in other areas). However it is not as simple an equation as:
Talk to Business People = Answer all Business-focussed Questions
The feedback from different people will not be identical, variations may be driven by their personal experience, how long they have been at the company and what part of its operations they work in. Different people will also approach their work in different ways, some will want to be very numerically focussed in decision-making, others will rely more on experience and relationships. Also even getting information out of people in the first place is a skill in itself; it is a capital mistake for even the best analyst to theorise before they have data[6].
This heterogeneity means that one challenge in writing the business-focussed component of a Situational Analysis within an overall Information Strategy is sifting through the different feedback looking for items which people agree upon, or patterns in what people said and the frequency with which different people made similar points. This work is non-trivial and there is no real substitute for experience. However, one thing that I would suggest can help is to formally document discussions with business people. This has a number of advantages, such as being able to run this past them to check the accuracy and completeness of your notes[7] and being able to defend any findings as based on actual fact. However, documenting meetings also facilitates the analysis and synthesis process described above. These meeting notes can be read and re-read (or shared between a number of people collectively engaged in the strategy formulation process) and – when draft findings have been developed – these can be compared to the original source material to ensure consistency and completeness.
IT conversations
Depending on circumstances, talking to business people can often be the largest activity and will do most to formulate proposals that will appear in other parts of the Information Strategy. However the other types of questions also need to be considered and parallel discussions with general IT people are a prerequisite. An objective here is for the strategist to understand (and perhaps document) the overall IT landscape and how this flows into current information capabilities. Such a review can also help to identify mismatches between business aspirations and system capabilities; there may be a desire to report on data which is captured nowhere in the organisation for example.
The final tranche of discussions need to be with the information professionals who have built the current information landscape (assuming that they are still at the company, if not then the people to target are those who maintain information facilities). There can sometimes be an element of defensiveness to be overcome in such discussions, but equally no one will have a better idea about the challenges with existing information provision than the people who deal with this area day in and day out. It is worth taking the time to understand their thoughts and opinions. With both of these groups of IT people, formally documented notes and/or schematics are just as valuable as with the business people and for the same reasons.
Rinse and Repeat
The above conversations have been described sequentially, but some element of them will probably be in parallel. Equally the process is likely to be somewhat iterative. It is perhaps a good idea to meet with a subset of business people first, draw some very preliminary conclusions from these discussions and then hold some initial meetings with various IT people to both gather more information and potentially kick the tyres on your embryonic findings. Sometimes after having done a lot of business interviews, it is also worth circling back to the first cohort both to ask some different questions based on later feedback and also to validate the findings which you are hopefully beginning to refine by now.
Of course a danger here is that you could spend an essentially limitless time engaging with people and not ever landing your Situational Analysis; in particular person A may suggest what a good idea it would be for you to also meet with person B and person C (and so on exponentially). The best way to guard against this is time-boxing. Give your self a deadline, perhaps arrange for a presentation of an initial Situational Analysis to an audience at a point in the not-so-distance future. This will help to focus your efforts. Of course mentioning a presentation, or at least some sort of abridged Situational Analysis, brings up the idea of how to summarise the detailed information that you have uncovered through the process described above. This is the subject of the final section of this article.
In Summary
I will talk further about how to summarise findings and recommendations in Part III, for now I wanted to focus on just two aspects of this. First a mechanism to begin to identify areas of concern and second a simple visual way to present the key elements of an information-focussed Situational Analysis in a relatively simple exhibit.
Sorting the wheat from the chaff
To an extent, sifting through large amounts of feedback from a number of people is one way in which good IT professionals earn their money. Again experience is the most valuable tool to apply in this situation. However, I would suggest some intermediate steps would also be useful here both to the novice and the seasoned professional. If you have extensive primary material from your discussions with a variety of people and have begun to discern some common themes through this process, then – rather than trying to progress immediately to an overall summary – I would recommend writing notes around each of these common themes as a good place to start. These notes may be only for your own purposes, or they may be something that you also later choose to circulate as additional information; if you take the latter approach, then bear the eventual audience in mind while writing. Probably while you are composing these intermediate-level notes a number of things will happen. First it may occur to you that some sections could be split to more precisely target the issues. Equally other sections may overlap somewhat and could benefit from being merged. Also you may come to realise that you have overlooked some areas and need to address these.
Whatever else is happening, this approach is likely to give your subconscious some time to chew over the material in parallel. It is for this reason that sometimes the strategist will wake at night with an insight that had previously eluded them. Whether or not the subconscious contributes this dramatically, this rather messy and organic process will leave you with a number of paragraphs (or maybe pages) on a handful of themes. This can then form the basis of the more summary exhibit which I describe in the next section; namely a scorecard.
An Information Provision Scorecard
Of course a scorecard about the state of information provision approaches levels of self-reference that Douglas R Hofstadter[8] would be proud of. I would suggest that such a scorecard could be devised by thinking about each of the common themes that have arisen, considering each of the areas of questioning described above (business, design, technical, process and team), or perhaps a combination of both. The example scorecard which I provide above uses the areas of questions as its intermediate level. These are each split out into a number of sub-categories (these will vary from situation to situation and hence I have not attempted to provide actual sub-category names). A score can be allocated (based on your research) to each of these on some scale (the example uses a 5 point one) and these base figures can be rolled up to get a score for each of the intermediate categories. These can then be further summarised to give a single, overall score [9].
While a data visualisation such as the one presented here may be a good way to present overall findings, it is important that this can be tied back to the notes that have been compiled during the analysis. Sometimes such scores will be challenged and it is important that they are based in fact and can thus be defended.
Next steps
Of course your scorecard, or overall Situational Analysis, could tell you that all is well. If this is the case, then our work here may be done[10]. If however the Situational Analysis reveals areas where improvements can be made, or if there is a desire to move the organisation forward in a way that requires changes to information provision, then thought must be given to either what can be done to remediate problems or what is necessary to seize opportunities; most often a mixture of both. Considering these questions will be the subject of the final article in this series, Forming an Information Strategy: Part III – Completing the Strategy.
Addendum
When I published the first part of this series, I received an interesting comment from Gary Nuttall, Head of Business Intelligence at Chaucer Syndicates (you can view Gary’s profile on LinkedIn and he posts as @gpn01 on Twitter). I reproduce an extract from this verbatim below:
[When considering questions such as “Where are we?”] one thing I’d add, which for smaller organisations may not be relevant, is to consider who the “we” is (are?). For a multinational it can be worth scoping out whether the strategy is for the legal entity or group of companies, does it include the ultimate parent, etc. It can also help in determining the culture of the enterprise too which will help to shape the size, depth and span of the strategy too – for some companies a two pager is more than enough for others a 200 pager would be considered more appropriate.
I think that this is a valuable additional perspective and I thank Gary for providing this insightful and helpful feedback.
There are a whole raft of sub-questions here and I don’t propose to be exhaustive in this article.
[4]
In practice its at best a representative subset of the questions that would need to be answered to assemble a robust situational analysis.
[5]
To get some perspective on the potential range of business people it is necessary to engage in such a process, again see the aforementioned Developing an international BI strategy.
You can try to be cute here and weight scores before rolling them up. In practice this is seldom helpful and can give the impression that the precision of scoring is higher than can ever actually be the case. Judgement also needs to be exercised in determining which graphic to use to best represent a rolled up score as these will seldom precisely equal the fractions selected; quarters in this example. The strategist should think about whether a rounded-up or rounded-down summary score is more representative of reality as pure arithmetic may not suffice in all cases.
[10]
There remains the possibility that the current situation is well-aligned with current business practices, but will have problems supporting future ones. In this case perhaps a situational analysis is less useful, unless this is comparing to some desired future state (of which more in the next chapter).
This article is the first of three which address how to formulate an Information Strategy. I have written a number of other articles which touch on this subject[1] and have also spoken about the topic[2]. However I realised that I had never posted an in-depth review of this important area. This series of articles seeks to remedy this omission.
Part I – General Strategy explores the nature of strategy, lays some foundations and presents a framework of questions which will need to be answered in order to form any general strategy. Part II – Situational Analysis adapts the first part of this general framework – The Situational Analysis – to the task of starting to form an Information Strategy. The final chapter, Part III – Completing the Strategy, rounds out this process by working through the rest of the general framework and explaining how this can be used to produce a fully-formed Information Strategy.
As with all of my other articles, this essay is not intended as a recipe for success, a set of instructions which – if slavishly followed – will guarantee the desired outcome. Instead the reader is invited to view the following as a set of observations based on what I have learnt during a career in which the development of both Information Strategies and technology strategies in general have played a major role.
What is a Strategy?
This would seem to be a relatively easy question to answer as the word is used (more likely over-used) in many areas of human endeavour and in business in particular. Let’s start by seeing if we can reach a consensus by the power of Google:
Strategy (from Greek στρατηγία stratēgia, “art of troop leader; office of general, command, generalship”) is a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty. [and also later in the same article]Max McKeown (2011) argues that “strategy is about shaping the future” and is the human attempt to get to “desirable ends with available means”.
/stráttiji/ n.1 the art of war. 2 a the management of an army or armies in a campaign. b the art of moving troops, ships, aircraft, etc. into favourable positions (cf. TACTICS). c an instance of this or a plan formed according to it. 3 a plan of action or policy in business or politics etc. (economic strategy) [F stratégie f. Gk strātegia generalship f. stratēgeos]
[…] a method or plan chosen to bring about a desired future, such as achievement of a goal or solution to a problem. […]
So – assuming we decide, in the context of this blog, that the objective is probably not to better order military affairs, or to teach infantry men and women to write MDX – some sort of loose consensus emerges from the various definitions above. It seems that a strategy is something which seeks to influence the future, to bring about some conditions or cause an event, neither of which would manifest themselves without some action being taken[4]. I am going to adopt the definition that a strategy is a method to achieve some future objective; or at least to make the realisation of this aim more likely. This means that a strategy implies change. If the situation is now X then after the strategy has been successfully enacted then the situation will then be Y[5].
A Metaphor for Strategy
The role of change in strategy leads me to think about strategy formulation in the following way[6]. I think of situation X (the current one) as a place on a map. Then situation Y (the desired one) is a second place on the same map. We are at X and we want to get to Y, we have a starting point and a destination, an origin and a terminus. The shortest distance between two points is of course a straight line[7]. However a straight line between between X and Y may not exist (there could be a lake in between with no method to traverse this), or it might not be the quickest route (if the line passes over an intervening mountain, which could instead be more quickly circumnavigated). In general there may be more than one route between X and Y and each may have its advantages and disadvantages. I tend to think of strategy formation as the process by which the best (or, if this is all that is achievable, least bad) route is established.
Of course a challenge here is that – outside the realms of mathematics (or indeed SatNav) – there may not be an optimum route and equally no optimum strategy. Even if an optimum strategy does exist, the strategist may not have enough information[8] to hand to discern this. Also, while effecting change is the objective of a strategy, this aim may itself be impacted by change; to employ our metaphor of travel, change to the destination, or to the territory in between. This may mean that the route (the strategy) must be adjusted, or in some cases wholly abandoned in favour of a different approach. Strategy formulation has some scientific-like qualities and I will focus on some of these shortly. However for the reasons just put forward (and indeed others we will examine later) elements of the strategy formation process can sometimes be more of an art form.
Of course another problem could be that you don’t have a map!
Having introduced a geographic quality to describing strategy formation, I’ll leverage this analogy[9] for the rest of the article. However, first a slight detour to establish the credentials of your guide to the terrain of Information Strategy; namely me. Any readers who are already familiar with my work are encouraged to scroll past the next section.
So what do I know about Information Strategies anyway?
I have worked in IT for over quarter of a century with much of that related to turning data into information. Indeed one of my early tasks during my first job at a software house was to help design and develop the automated Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss statements provided as part of the company’s flagship product. These took the transactions entered into the company’s General Ledger system and assembled them into sensible Financial statements, which could be sliced and diced[10] by period, cost centre or project code. However, my full initiation to the related areas of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing was not until the beginning of 2000, when I was asked to establish a Management Information function for a pan-European insurance organisation. This means that I don’t reach my 15-year BI/DW milestone until New Year (actually probably some point in the middle of January 2015)[11].
Having both developed and executed an Information Strategy for the European part of this company, I extended both of these processes to encompass Latin America. I then developed a broader Information Strategy which included all of their International operations. It is gratifying to note that this strategy still guides information provision at this organisation to this day. After this, I went on to shape Information Strategies for other companies in sectors such as Manufacturing, Retail and back to Reinsurance / Insurance again. In each of these cases, I either saw the execution of these strategies through to at least their first delivery, or the programmes of work that I crafted were then executed by the teams that I had built.
There are many good resources available in printed form and on-line for those who want to understand various approaches to general strategy formulation. For readers who are interested in strategy outside of a technology context and specifically outside of the area of Information Strategy, then Google is your friend. For anyone who is still with us, then while I would not claim to be an all-purpose strategy guru, I think that it is worth starting by presenting some general questions that pertain to the area of strategy formation. I am going to cast these in the shape of the geographic / journey metaphor that I developed above. Adopting this framework, any general strategy will have to answer the following questions:
Where are we?
Answering this question is the province of a Situational Analysis. Such a study will highlight what is good about the current situation as well as what needs to be changed.
Where do we want to be instead and why?
Here it is useful to consider two things: first Drivers for Change (which may emerge from the Situational Analysis); second a further question, What does good look like? This area is thus a mixture of what is wrong with the current situation and what would be good about the one proposed as the objective of the strategy[12].
How do we get there, how long will it take and what will it cost?
Thinking of the most perfect of destinations is going to be of little use if it costs too much to get there or the journey time is prohibitive. Here the strategist needs to get more concrete and consider realistic estimates of time and money.
Will the trip be worth it?
There is a relation here to areas covered under the earlier bullet points, but answering this question will normally require some sort of cost/benefit analysis. In describing what good looks like, many potential benefits may be articulated, here there is a need to quantify them as best as is possible.
What else can we do along the way?
Some might quibble at the inclusion of this item. However I think that the metaphor of a journey lends itself to considering what tactical work can help buttress the central activities of the strategy.
The framing of the above in terms pertinent to a journey may not be familiar[13], but I think that it is useful. This metaphor also has the benefit of alluding to what is inevitably the case with each of strategy development, strategy execution and the most worthwhile of journeys; they seldom happen overnight.
Having laid some general foundations, the next article in this series, Part II, will begin to be more specific and consider how these questions can be applied to forming the first element an Information Strategy, a Situational Analysis.
Actually The Oxford English Dictionary and Thesaurus (1997). Ink on cellulose pulp edition (this format used to be quite popular once upon a time). Also still available from antiquarian booksellers.
Assuming Euclidean Geometry, if not then maybe try this instead.
[8]
Here I am using the term generally rather than in the sense of information generated by systems, which even today remains mostly numeric; albeit that other forms of data have streaked ahead of dowdy old numbers some time ago. Numeric data tends to be somewhat easier to transform into information than non-numeric; at least for now.
[9]
Perhaps it is worth introducing a note of caution about the over-extension of analogies here – I do this in an earlier article bearing the same name.
[10]
To this day, I have a compulsion to write “dice and slice” as opposed to “slice and dice”, despite the latter being a more logical sequence of events when approaching – say – a butternut squash.
[11]
I am looking forward to my engraved TDWI decanter immensely.
[12]
Sometimes the current situation is so bad that simply addressing its shortcomings is enough work for a strategy to consider. More often a strategy will look to ad value beyond just remediating current issues.
[13]
Though I can hardly claim to be the first person to come up with this metaphor.
The author, working from home together with his Executive Assistant
The author, engaged in measuring maturity – © 
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