Comments on: Wecome Back, Information Center – All Is Forgiven!

By: itorganization2017

itorganization2017 — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 07:45:23 +0000

Great comment, Cindy, thanks! You are absolutley correct. One way I’ve talked about the future of IT is the notion of ‘business-IT convergence’ – i.e., over time, the business becomes (and we IT professionals must help them) more IT savvy, and IT becomes more business savvy. Anything we can all do – business and IT professional – to achieve this is for the good. There used to be a hard, wide, high ‘wall’ between business and IT. The Information Center was an early attempt to break through that wall. As you note, there were important lessons learned from that attempt – we can learn from history – from what worked well, and what did not!

By: Cindy Allingham

Cindy Allingham — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:39:42 +0000

As a manager of an IC in the late 80s, I revelled in the ability to provide business users with a window into new technology and how it might be used to solve business problems. The mistake that was made then, I believe, still exists today. The IC was staffed with people who knew the technology well and were able to articulate capabilities. However, IC staff knew very little about the business problems faced by their users.

Fast forward to 2008. IT staff are necessarily focused on technology, IT operations and capabilities, but are not savvy about business issues. Moreover, they are not invited to participate in business processes or sought out for their views on how the business might change to take advantage of capabilities.

A great example is DB2, which is nearly 30 years old. When it was introduced by the IC I managed it was heralded as a great step by business. Since then many database tools have been offered and the technology has progressed. However, the problem then, as now, was that business users resisted pooling their knowledge to define and standardize data, preferring to operate in isolation of one another from a data point-of-view.

Business users are a lot more technologically knowledgeable now, so you would think that they know better how to get the best out of business data. Don’t bring back the IC until business users can figure out what they want to do, and then make sure that business expertise is included in the mandate.

By: itorganization2017

itorganization2017 — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:16:55 +0000

Great point! I wonder how that issue changes as we move from a world of highly structured and indexed data, to more of a tag based approach?

By: snowdog0731

snowdog0731 — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:04:45 +0000

Your post brought back fond rememberences of past data problems I dealt with as a FOCUS guru. I documented them in a post on my blog. Here is my conclusion: "At the heart of the matter then as is now is understanding the context and meaning of data resources, organizing those services that provide access to data, and designing some sort of architecture to minimize bad data in the first place. This has been, is currently, and will always be the big issue in self-service of information no matter what other technology changes take place."