Organizing data governance and many ways to mess it up again

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

A world without government is a pretty horrible prospect. In such a world, everyone would be at war in a struggle to survive. To avoid such an environment, we prefer to hand over some of our natural rights to a government. We give up some of our freedom to receive protection. This is the purpose of government.

John Locke (1632-1704) has argued that creating a state is not a top-down exercise: a society is the result of a social contract between citizens. We pay taxes and therefore receive protection, infrastructure and social benefits.

In our modern days, there is a new aspect to this: we expect data governance. But is this well thought through yet? I published a series of articles on this question.

Whose Data Is It, Anyway? was the first article on data governance in the public sector and commercial enterprise. It presented a bit of a "big brother" doom and gloom scenario, I am afraid. But is it unlikely? I don't know.

In The TomTom Case – Were Police Using or Abusing Data Analytics?, I included a real-life case study, describing how a police force used collected TomTom satnav data in order to plan speed traps. Ethical or not?

The third article Who Owns Your Data? focused on the private sector. Digital data governance isn’t clearly organized. Who owns the location-based data on your smartphone? The phone company? The phone manufacturer? Or do you feel you own the text messages, voicemail, emails and pictures you stored on your phone? And who owns the status updates you put on Facebook, you or Facebook?

In the final article of the series Organizing Data Governance - And Many Ways to Mess it Up Again, I concluded with two topics. First I described how to organize data governance in a less traditional way. Then, I did the opposite and described some ways to mess it up again, to protect our interests until the public and private sectors get it right.

Change you can believe in

By: Rik Hoogenberg, chief executive officer

Be Informed’s case based approach in administrative processes, that are becoming more knowledge-intensive, allows organizations to boost efficiency, agility and customer intimacy. Organizations that do not postpone the inevitable and carefully plan an overhaul of their business processes with Be Informed profit most from these benefits. Yet many IT projects in large organizations fail. How to succeed in changing the way your organization works? It’s simpler than you might think.

First of all, working with Be Informed allows you to change the way you work. Considering that many administrative organizations have organized their work in overcomplicated systems, procedures and applications, this would seem a logical step, right? Then, make sure your transformation is done by people with a ‘can do’, solution oriented approach. This requires critical minds, looking for the simplest solutions. To give you an example; an administrative organization required an ID from citizens to perform certain actions. Many hours of discussions were spent on which type of ID would suffice: passport, drivers licence, or ID card. ID regulations as described in national law proved these discussions to be pointless; use what is needed, instead of what is currently implemented.

An important reason why many IT-projects in large organizations fail, is that traditionally all requirements, functionalities and so forth need to be exhaustively predescribed and, consequently, built. These projects take years, increasing the risk that the eventual outcome will be outdated upon implementation. Simply because too many changes will have taken place: in business, technology, society, et cetera. Also, many organizations fail to benefit from innovative technology by upholding the complicatedness of their systems and processes in new environments. With Be Informed, organizations don’t need to build systems or applications, we model our solutions based on a central business model, using a pragmatic approach that allows business users to see what they get, and reuse what is there already. Working with Be Informed means successful innovation by simplifying systems and processes.

We don’t ask the business users what they want, we interact with them on what they need to do their job. As car manufacturer Henry Ford once said: “If I had asked them what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.

Within one or two months we present the first application showing the new way of working, discussing functional requirements with business users. This way, enthusiasm for new solutions is gained from the start of the project, which will prove helpful along the way in which an integrated approach, supported by a solution oriented project team consisting of experts from all corners of the organization will guarantee the organizations ability to embrace complexity for years to come.