About a month ago I posted on LinkedIn to say that I am starting a campaign to draw a clear distinction between people who are experts in information and those people who deal with (and are experts in) technology. In the spirit of full disclosure, I confess that I wrote this with a sense of frustration at looking at the umpteenth CIO job description and discovering it was actually just an IT job, but the response has been terrific. Over two and a half thousand views of the post and a bag full of likes! So it’s a popular sentiment among information profession colleagues across the world, and that’s great.
Over the coming weeks I am going to blog about my personal experience. I want to start by saying that I have the greatest of respect for the digital and technology team in my own organisation: they are a group of quite wonderful professionals with whom I work closely on a daily basis, and without whom we could not operate. But our relationship works well precisely because we have clear (i.e. documented) agreement over our respective roles and responsibilities - and we stick to them. I don’t try to advise staff on software faults and they don’t advise on the the requirements of information law; result = happiness all round.
Here's an example: Amazon is, in many ways a great tech success story. They have helped to transform online retail: you can buy almost anything and have it arrive on your doorstep within 24 hours. But if Amazon consistently sent out the wrong things to the wrong customers, it might find itself out of business. Its website shop front and the technology that supports it are a critical part of its infrastructure, but if its data management was poor, if its marketing strategy was bad, if it failed to learn from its mistakes or react to trends, then it might be doomed, and all the tech in the world would not be able save it. Technology is always an enabler - an important one - but nothing more. The real substance of a business, and to a certain extent its USP, (even the likes of Amazon or Google) is in what is knows and how it applies its knowledge.
But many organisations have a fundamental problem with looking after their knowledge. Their governance is configured to commit a scandalous waste of resources. If, for example an organisation was not looking after its people and had a major recruitment and retention problem, then its days might be numbered. If it was bleeding money, the shareholders or trustees might express concern, if its capital assets were not being maintained or used effectively, it might suddenly find itself having to raise funds quickly to reinvest, damaging confidence in its stock value. No company board worth anything would tolerate such failures so why do so many organisations, and many in the UK public sector, fail to look after their knowledge assets: all the accumulated corporate memory, know-how, experience and hard work of its people over many years? What if it was running massive risks but lacked any system of control to begin to understand what these were, let alone manage them, until it is too late? The failure to see information as an asset worthy of board level sponsorship, is a failure perpetrated by too many organisations and it is costing them, often invisibly, until a regulator or the Information Commissioner comes calling.
Knowledge, information and data need to be championed at board level in their own right. It is not the answer to hand over responsibility for these areas to the IT Director; doing so creates a conflict of interest in my view. In my own organisation I am a customer of the IT department and the separation of the customer (me) from the supplier (the IT) gives me leverage when I need to keep the organisation compliant and prevent the IT professionals (and lovely people they are too) from making our information risks go bad.
Organisations need to look at the balance of power operating within their governance structures to make sure it is not compromising on one of its most vital assets. IT might be be considerable capital investment, attract big teams and huge risk that requires very senior oversight, but information and data should not form part of that equation.
Imagine for a second that you are the CEO of Amazon and ask yourself this question: what is more important for my customers: the thing inside the box or the box the thing came in? IT enables, but good information management delivers the goods.
