This is the first blog in a series on “Creating organizational resiliency through a dynamic, ROI based information management strategy”. Yes, that’s quite a lot to take in, but I will continue to elaborate in this series of blogs.
At the highest level, the Information Management (IM) strategy pillars are People, Processes and Policies, Regulations, Technology, and Information. I will continue to expand upon these pillars in future blogs.
Our first task in an IM strategy is to document the organization’s strategic goals and the initiatives that will support those goals. From here, we analyze what data and processes are required to maintain current initiatives, and undertake new ones.
As you can see, this activity covers all the pillars of a complete IM strategy. We start with this exercise so that we can compare all information gathered for each of the pillars against the organization’s strategic goals and objectives.
For the people pillar, we need to consider stakeholders such as customer, shareholder or owner, employee, and external partners and their journeys. In future blogs, we’ll touch on customer and employee journeys as examples. This exercise alone can yield new insights for organizations.
Processes and policies are key to understanding an organization’s nimbleness and resiliency. In IM strategies, we focus on the processes and policies that will affect data gathering and usage. These include data governance organization and procedures.
Regulations and laws are included in an IM strategy since organizations react to new or obsolete laws and regulations as required. Life Sciences are filled with regulations for drug approval and post-acceptance reporting. In addition, patient data requires HIPAA and privacy concerns as well as emerging regulations such as GDPR. Additional compliance to the Sunshine Act, SOX and global regulations have some of the greatest effects on a successful IM strategy. Many organizations are struggling to react to new laws so they must understand their capabilities before new laws are introduced.
The Information pillar includes understanding where data is originated, mastered and updated as well as where it is used, shared and enriched, including analytics. In addition, organizations must assess their data quality attributes for validity, availability, consistency, and timeliness.
There is much to consider when creating an Information Management Roadmap and we will discuss prioritization, return on investment, resiliency, business capabilities, risk levels and the impact of regulations.
