Phil Windley writes of a conversation he had with a small business owner who needs to work 12 hours a day to stay on top of everything that happens in his expanding business. For the leadership there there is a need to understand (and even control) many aspects of an organization. But working more hours doesn't really scale up very well. Windley, being a former CIO, sees IT as a solution to this problem.
A few things worth noting:
This problem isn't confined to small businesses (and I don't think Windley suggests that it is). Organization leaders (in the educational realm, principals, directors, and superintendents) need a good understanding of what is happening in their organizations. The problem becomes more acute when dealing with larger organizations.
This is an area where IT can make the transition from consuming organizational resources ($$) to really helping to move an organization forward. This can be done by helping manage and facilitate the flow of information. This sort of information management can be quite useful both at the tactical level (what's happening now, and in the near-term) and at the strategic level (longer term trends).
Windley puts forth this idea of a IT maturity hierarchy. At the bottom of this hierarchy we see core IT functions, like infrastructure and storage. At the top, information and business intelligence. Windley sees the bottom layers as hurdles that many small businesses have not yet passed on their way to the more valuable bits on the top.
Even though I'm not sure its possible, I'd like to try and separate the notions of IT (which most often focuses on matters of infrastructure--servers, networks, and the like) and information management. Although it would be considerably more difficult, I think that you could put together a useful information management strategy in the absence of some of the lower-layer items. Or at least, information management could exist alongside other IT activities, rather than being dependent on them.
Posted by Karl
September 22, 2003 08:25 AM