Number crunching

26 Jun 09
JOHN THORNTON | Decide now if you’re going to let data streamline or swamp your organisation

Decide now if you’re going to let data streamline or swamp your organisation

Perhaps the biggest and least well recognised component of modernisation programmes is the ‘Information Challenge’ – how do you get the right information to the right people in the right place in the right context at the right time?

The Information Challenge is not new. The impressive Treasury building in central London always seems to remain strangely cool, even in the height of summer. According to civil service folklore, this is because the original plans for the building were inadvertently loaded on to a ship bound for India.

At that time, plans were expensive and time consuming to produce, meaning no copies were kept. The plans for the new building in Calcutta, which should have been on the ship, were therefore used in London, rather than face the delay, extra costs and embarrassment of bringing the original plans back to Britain.

In many ways, modern technology has made it much easier to manage information in a timely manner. When designing and constructing buildings today, for example, computer-aided design allows for continuous collaboration by teams working in different countries and time zones.

Unfortunately, technology has also worsened problems, with an explosion in data. In theory, this can be used to improve decision-making, speed up service provision and optimise performance.

Customer relationship management systems, for example, are providing an increasingly coherent picture of citizens’ contacts with public bodies, the services they use and their levels of satisfaction.

Unfortunately, in most public bodies this sort of analysis is still largely under-developed, in contrast with supermarkets, which have become very skilled at using this type of information.

Traditionally, public bodies have held information in functional and organisational silos, used it where needed and then ‘harvested’ it for reporting at higher levels.

To meet the new information challenges, organisations need to adopt a more holistic and organisation-wide approach, consolidating their information sources and ensuring the integrity of data.

The usual way to do this is to create what is termed a ‘data warehouse’. In simple terms, this means collecting, collating, managing and storing data in a consistent and accessible format. It means holding each piece of information once only and ‘cleansing’ existing data to reconcile anomalies.

This integration and data cleansing process can be time consuming. But it is essential that it is well planned and executed, as it would be foolhardy to build your new data warehouse on the sands of inconsistent and redundant
data. Fortunately, powerful software tools and companies exist that are skilled in taking organisations through this and subsequent stages.

In crude terms, a data warehouse is an enormous ‘bucket’ of data, which is constantly being updated, coupled with sophisticated tools to store, reference and ‘slice and dice’ the data. Importantly, you don’t have to structure and reference all of this data. You now have powerful search tools that can dip into the data to answer questions you hadn’t even thought of when the data was collected.

One police force, for example, had collected a lot of textual information (on brief notes) in two systems that held information relating to cars and vehicle-related offences.

This was inconsistent but when analysed it contained information that helped reduce car crime, target resources more effectively and make better assessments of the risks officers faced when stopping specific vehicles.

Information needs to be ‘circulated’, not just stored. It is only of value if it can be used for problem-solving and better decision-making.

According to leading analysts, the production of digital information is growing at a compound rate of 60%. This means that by 2011 the world will be producing about 1,800bn gigabytes of digital information each year, which is equivalent to about 36,000bn four- drawer filing cabinets, and is ten times more than the amount created in 2006.

If you are currently having difficulties managing information, just think how difficult it will be in five years if you don’t improve your systems now.

John Thornton is an independent adviser and writer on business transformation, financial management and innovation, and executive director of E-ssential Resources. He is also author of the CIPFA publication, Top ten tips for delivering efficiencies through technology
[email protected]

http://www.e-ssentialresources.co.uk/

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