Showing posts with label Information Management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Information Management. Show all posts

August 25, 2016

Modesty And Privacy Of Body and Information

So modesty and privacy is very important in terms of propriety and security.

Both are intimately connected. 

Already as children, we learn not to show or talk about our "privates" to others. 

And as adults, we understand that there are certain things about ourselves that we don't just talk about or divulge to others indiscriminately. 

Not being discrete with these and showing either your private parts or your personal information can get you in a load of trouble by giving others the opportunity to take undue advantage of you. 

Both open you up to be ridiculed or even raped of your person or information identity. 

That which is yours to use with others in propriety is instead disclosed for taking out from your control and for use against you. 

Security demands modesty of body and of information, and if not taken seriously, then no amount of lame covering will keep that which is private from public consumption. ;-)
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January 22, 2016

Poor Decision-Making Inc.


(Click the image for larger size)
___________________________

There is a funny Organization Chart of Indecision by Corter Consulting circulating on the Social Media. 

This graphic (above) by me can be thought of as the corollary for Poor Decision-Making.

It is headed by the Chief, Bad Decisions.

Supporting the Chief is the EVP of Strong-Arming.

Reporting to the Chief are 6 VPs of:

- Haste

- Intuition

- Incompetence

- Misinformation

- Narcissism

- Corruption

Followed by 16 Directors of:

- Get It Over With
- It's Too Hard

- Feelings
- Myths
- I Just Don't Know

- Ignorance
- Ineptitude

- Lack of Data
- Bad Data
- Misinterpretation

- What's In It For Me (WIIFM)
- Legacy
- Arrogance

- Fraud
- Waste
- Abuse

Hope you enjoy this Org Chart of Poor Decision-Making and I look forward to your comments on it. 

(Source Graphic: Andy Blumenthal)
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June 5, 2015

People Are Our Greatest Asset, Goodbye!

The Chinese are smart and talented, and there is a cyberwar going on. 

They are suspected are having just stolen the personnel information of 4 million federal government workers.

And there are 4.2 million active, including 1.5 million military personnel. 

So if as they are apt to say, "people are our greatest asset"...

...then we just sort of lost the CROWN JEWELS in terms of highly personal, sensitive, and critical information on the people that handle everything from defense and diplomacy to the economy, energy, the environment, justice, and health and wellbeing. 

Oops!

This is getting scary folks. 

When the adversary through cyber (and other) espionage can know our people, our technology, our communications, virtually everything...then we got some big vulnerabilities!

If we can't defend ourselves adequately (at least for now), I hope at least we are doing okay on the offense! ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
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November 1, 2014

More Information, Please.

This was a funny sign in a local medical facility. 

Printed: "Labcorp is no longer in this building."

Followed by in handwriting, "Then Where is it?"

Almost to the familiar reframe, "Well I dunno--do you? If not you--than who?"

These were plastered in multiple locations exactly like this. 

It's funny, we think we are giving people information--the stuff they need. 

But when it comes across to the other person, perhaps all we've done is left them with more questions than answers. 

In an age of information technology, business analytics, big data, and artificial intelligence...we still can't even seem to figure out the basics of managing information and communications with each other. 

Lots of products being heralded as the answer...including IBM's Watson, but aside from answering Jeopardy questions, the jury is still out on whether this can really evolve to true AI.

If it was just a technology issue, we may already be getting close, but the bigger piece of this puzzle is people really understanding the challenges they confront, and being able identify and work with the information to solve these. 

Then maybe we would finally have the answers or at least where it is! ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)
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June 2, 2014

Information Where We Look


I like this short video on advances in Augmented Reality by Applied Research Associates (ARA).

ARA supports DARPA's Urban Leader Tactical Response Awareness and Visualization (ULTRA-Vis) program--to develop Augmented Reality (AR) for our soldiers. 

Augmented Reality is "Virtual icons, avatars, and messages overlaid accurately on the real world."

The purpose is to know"where you are and where objects are around you" and to "access information simply by looking at them."

The interface is a heads-up wearable display, rather than an smartphone or tablet. 

The AR integrates GPS, terrain information, commercial data, and sensors.

Further, you and others using this technology will be able to tag and share data in what I would call Social Reality (a mixture of social computing and augmented reality). 

Here your world of information is augmented by other's AR views shared with you.

AR offers an enormous opportunity to make our world far richer with information everywhere we look, rather than just when we look it up. 

For it to be ultimately successful, the display will need to be worked in as an embed or overlay on our actual eyes (like a contact lens), rather than worn like Google Glass.

For the non-soldier, not every open field needs augmented reality--in fact, it would sort of spoil the natural beauty of it--but it sure won't hurt to be able to turn it on, at will, to see which flowers are blooming and perhaps, whether there just might be a snake out there too.  ;-)
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February 8, 2013

What's Your Information Lifecycle


A critical decision for every person and organization is how long to keep information out there in the physical and cyber realms.

Delete something too soon--and you may be looking in vain for that critical document, report, file, picture, or video and may even violate record retention requirements.

Fail to get rid of something--and you may be embarrassed, compromised, ripped off, or even put in legal jeopardy. 
It all depends what the information is, when it is from, and who gets their hands and eyes on it!

Many stars have been compromised by paparazzi or leaked photos that ended up on the front page of newspapers or magazines and even government officials have ended up in the skewer for getting caught red handed like ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner sexting on Twitter.

Everything from statuses to photos put on social media have gotten people in trouble whether when applying to schools and jobs, with their partners, and even with law enforcement. 

Information online is archived and searchable and it is not uncommon for parents to warn kids to be careful what they put online, because it can come back to haunt them later. 

Now smartphones applications like Snapchat are helping people communicate and then promptly delete things they send. 

With Snapshot, you can snap a photo, draw on it, even add text and send to friends, family, others. The innovation here is that before you hit send, you choose how long you want the message to be available to the recipient before vanishing--up to 10 seconds.

Snapchat has sent over 1 billion messages since July and claims over 50 million are sent daily--although forget trying to verify that by counting up the messages because they have self-destructed and are gone!

Of course, there are workarounds such as taking a screenshot of the message before it vanishes or taking a photo of the message--so nothing is full proof. 

Last year, according to The Atlantic, the European Commission proposed a "Right-To Be Forgotten" as part of their data protection and privacy laws. This would require social media sites to remove by request embarrassing information and photos and would contrast with the U.S. freedom of speech rights that protects "publishing embarrassing but truthful information."

Now, companies like Reputation.com even provide services for privacy and reputation management where they monitor information about you online, remove personal information from sites that sell it, and help you with search engine optimization to "set the record straight" with personal, irrelevant, exaggerated or false information by instead publishing positive truthful material.

According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek (7 Feb. 2013), "Ephemeral data is the future," but I would say comprehensive reputation management is the future--whether through the strategic management of permanent information or removing of temporary data--we are in a sense who the record says we are. ;-)

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April 22, 2012

I Hate Paper

Paper has been around for approximately two thousand years, since it's invention in China, and it has served as the medium of choice for recording and sharing information ever since. 

However, enter the age of information technology and we are now able to capture, process, and store far more information, quicker, cheaper, and more efficiently than we ever could with paper. 

Combine that with the environmental impact and the need to conserve, and we have numerous federal laws calling for the reduction or elimination of paper, to the extent practical.

1) The Paperwork Reduction Act (1980) calls for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to regulate collection of information and establish information policies to reduce the paper handled by the government. 

2) The Government Paperwork Elimination Act (1998) mandates the use of electronic forms, filings, and signatures for official business with the public. 

3) E-Government Act (2002) requires use of the Internet to improve citizen access to information and services. 

All three are a recognition of the need to move from costly paper-based processes and the management of maintenance of mountains of paper records to instead leverage information technology to re-engineer and improve the way we perform information management. 

It's funny, but for me it's almost become a personal crusade to make better use of information technology to perform our mission and business of government more effectively, and I personally keep as little paper records, as possible--instead choosing to manage predominantly online--and it's great.   

Aside from having a cleaner office--no paper files, I enjoy all the benefits of electronic filing, search, and the ability to quickly share files with others in the office without having to rummage through a stack of papers 3 feet deep! 

Working in some areas that are still paper intensive for case management and so on, I have taken on the mantra, which I frequency cite of "I hate paper!" 

No, I don't really hate it, but in order to change decades old manual and paper intensive processes, we need to exaggerate a little and tell ourselves and other we hate it, so we can help change the inefficient and costly status quo. 

You can only imagine how surprised I was to read in The Atlantic (20 April 2012)--that "Paper: [Is] The Material of the Future."

Essentially, the article touts the new developments with paper using nanotechnology to make it water-proof (although you can still write on it), magnetic, fluorescent, and even anti-bacterial. 

Imagine paper that you can stick to your file cabinet, spill coffee on, light up the room with, and even keep you from getting sick--yes, that's fairly impressive!

However, while these new features are wonderful indeed and will increase the usability of paper as well as improve records management of them, I do not want to see us get complacent with reducing our use of paper and making better use of technology.  

Even with these cool nano-tech improvements to paper coming our way, I am still going to say, "I hate paper!"

(Source Photo: here with attribution to Earthworm)

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May 21, 2011

The Information Blanket

On July 4, 1976--the 200th anniversary of our free and democratic nation, something incredible was happening in Uganda--Operation Entebbe, a rescue operation to free over a hundred hostages at Entebee Airport.

This rescue operation became the basis for the movie Operation Thunderbolt, one of of my favorite movies (aside from Rocky).

The movie portrays the heroic and miraculous raid at Entebbe Airport in Uganda by the IDF to save the hostages of Air France flight 139, with 248 passengers and 12 crew (the Jews were later upon landing separated from the non-Jews and held captive, while the others were released). IDF Commandos with only a week of planning and preparation, travelled 2,500 miles in a daring operation that resulted in the rescue of the 103 hostages in a 90 minutes raid. Only three hostages and the commander of the mission, Lt Col Yonatan Netanyahu (the older brother of the Prime Minister of Israel today) were killed in the battle.

Despite, Uganda's support of the terrorists in this event 35 years ago (a long time yes, but still pretty awful), today to help innocent people of this country and others that can benefit, I write about...The Information Blanket.

BMB, an independent advertising consumer PR company launched The Information Blanket this month to fight infant mortality.

According to Fast Company (June 2011), the Blanket is targeted for a country like Uganda where "on average 77 of every 1,000 Ugandan babies will die before they reach their first birthday."

The creative director of BMB worked with UNICEF to "determine which health facts would best educate mothers and hopefully prevent infant death" and then they designed The Information Blanket with easy to read and understand information such as:

1) Vaccinations--"Get your baby vaccinated: 6, 10, 14 weeks."
2) Feeding--"Breast-feed 8-12 times a day."
3) Doctors--"Don't forget to schedule your doctor appointment."
4) Temperature--"38 degrees Celsius."
5) Growth--"Growth chart (months)."
6) Warnings--"Warning signs: unconsciousness, convulsions, fever, diarrhea, vomiting, eye discharge, poor appetite, fast breathing, dehydration."

These days, when going paperless and making everything digital is practically a mantra, I find The Information Blanket not only an effort to help people save lives, but a refreshing reminder that information can be delivered in many ways. And whether on a rock, a tree, bits and bytes, or a blanket, getting information out there to people is education, growth, and life for humanity.

Also, the role of design in effective communications and information technology is critical. Apple gets it...heck, they practically invented it. The more we incorporate good design and innovation into our communications, the more effective they have a chance to be.

(Source Photo: BMB)

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May 15, 2008

Information Governance and Enterprise Architecture

We all know that information is vital to making sound and timely decisions. How do we govern information (the term information to include data and information) so that it is truly valuable to the organization and not just another case of GIGI (Garbage In, Garbage Out)?

DM Review, May 2008, reports on some research by Accenture that confirms that “high-performing organizations make far better use of information than their peers.”

Information is a strategic enterprise asset. The key to getting better results from information is the effective use of information governance. Information governance includes decision making and management over the full information life cycle, including: information capture, processing, storage, retrieval, and reporting and disposition.

Without information governance, what can happen to corporate information assets and the end users that rely on it?

  1. Information Hoarding (or Silos)—the information exists in the organization, but people hoard it rather than share information. They treat information as power and currency and they do not readily provide information to others in their organization even if it helps the organization they work for.
  2. Information Quality NOT (“multiple versions of the truth”)—information quality will suffer if decisions are not made and enforced to ensure authoritative information sources, quality control processing, and adequate security to protect it.
  3. Information Overload—not managing the way information is rolled up, presented, and reported can result is too much information that cannot be readily processed or understood by those on the receiving end. It’s like the floodgates have been opened or as one of my bosses used to say, “trying to drink from a fire hose.”
  4. Information Gaps—without proper requirements gathering and planning and provision for systems to meet information needs, users may be left holding the bag, and it’s empty; they won’t have the information they need to support their functional processes and day-to-day decision making needs.

Not having effective information governance is costly for the organization. The target enterprise architecture state for information management is to have the right information to the right people at the right time. Anything less will mean sub-optimized processes, excessive management activity, and poor decision making and that will be costly for the organization—lost sales, dissatisfied customers, compliance lapses, safety and legal issues, publicity snafus, and other mistakes that can even put the enterprise out of business!

According to Accenture’s survey of more than 1000 large companies in the U.S. and UK, information is not being governed very well today:

  • “Managers spend more than one quarter of their work week searching for information.
  • More than half of what they obtain is of no value.
  • Managers accidently use the wrong data more than once a week.
  • It is challenging to get different parts of the company to share needed information.”

The good news is that “the majority of CIOs seem ready to act” by employing information governance.

Information, as one of the perspectives of the enterprise architecture, is already governed through the Enterprise Architecture Board (EAB). However, to give more focus to information governance, perhaps we need to establish a separate Information Governance Board (IGB). I see the IGB as a sub-committee of the EAB that provides findings and recommendation to the EAB; the EAB would be the decision authority for governing all the perspectives of the architecture, including: performance, business, information, services, technology, security, and human capital. To better focus and decompose on the various EA perspective areas, perhaps they will all have their own sub-committees (like a Performance Governance Board, Business Governance Board, and so forth) similar to the IGB in the future.


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May 6, 2008

Information Management and Enterprise Architecture

Information management is the key to any enterprise architecture.

Information is the nexus between the business and technical components of the EA:

  • On one hand, we have the performance requirements and the business processes to achieve those.
  • On the other hand, we have systems and technologies.
  • In between is the information.

Information is required by the business to perform its functions and activities and it is served up by the systems and technologies that capture, process, transmit, store, and retrieve it for use by the business. (The information perspective is sandwiched in between the business and the services/technology perspectives.)

Recently, I synthesized a best practice for information management. This involves key values, goals for these, and underlying objectives. The values and objectives include the following:

  1. Sharing –making information visible, understandable, and accessible.
  2. Quality—information needs to be valid, consistent, and comprehensive.
  3. Efficiency—information should be requirement-based (mission-driven), non-duplicative, timely, and delivered in a financially sound way.
  4. Security—information must be assured in terms of confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
  5. Compliance—information has to comply with requirements for privacy, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and records management.

The importance of information management to enterprise architecture was recently addressed in DM Review Magazine, May 2008. The magazine reports that in developing an architecture, you need to focus on the information requirements and managing these first and foremost!

“You need to first understand and agree on the information architecture that your business needs. Then determine the data you need, the condition of that data and what you need to do to cleanse, conform, and transform that data into business transformation.”

Only after you fully understand your information requirements, do you move on to develop technology solutions.

“Next, determine what technologies (not products) are required by the information and data architectures. Finally, almost as an afterthought, evaluate and select products.” [I don’t agree with the distinction between technologies and products, but I do agree that you first need your information requirements.]

Remember, business drives technology—and this is done through information requirements—rather than doing technology for technology’s sake.

“Let me also suggest …Do not chase the latest and greatest if your incumbent products can get the job done.”

In enterprise architecture, the customer/end-user is king and the information requirements are their edicts.


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May 2, 2008

Executive Dashboards and Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise architecture makes information visible to enable better decision making in the organization. One tool to help do this is the executive dashboard.

In management information systems, a dashboard is a executive information system user interface that (similar to an automobile's dashboard) is designed to be easy to read. For example, a product might obtain information from the local operating system in a computer, from one or more applications that may be running, and from one or more remote sites on the Web and present it as though it all came from the same source. (Wikipedia)

Dashboards help manage information overload:

  • “After three decades of aggressive computerization, companies are drowning in data and information. People produced about five exabytes of new information in 2002, twice the amount created just two years earlier” (Trend: The New Rules of Information Management by Jeffrey Rothfeder)
  • Dashboard are a way to take the fire hose flood of information that we get every day and make it more actionable by structuring it, focusing it, and making it more understandable often through visual displays. Note, this is similar to User-centric Enterprise Architecture’s use of principles of communications and design, such as information visualization to effectively communicate the baseline, target, and transition plan in the organization.

Dashboards provide business intelligence:

  • Dashboards, like enterprise architecture itself, contribute to translating data into business intelligence. EA does this by capturing, analyzing, cataloging, and serving up information in useful and usable ways to enhance decision making by the end-users. Dashboards do this by capturing and aggregating performance metrics, and displaying them in easy-to-read and often, customizable formats.

Dashboards generally focus on performance:

  • Dashboards generally are used for displaying, monitoring, and managing an organization’s performance metrics. Note, “performance” is one of the perspectives of the enterprise architecture, so dashboards are a nifty way to make that EA perspective really come alive!
  • According to DM Review, 15 April 2008, “Dashboards Help Drive and Improve Performance Metrics…Presented in highly visual charts and graphs, this data can provide each level of the organization with the information it needs to best perform…Dashboards also can be a key driver of performance improvement initiatives, offering a simple and graphical way to make key performance indicators (KPIs) visible throughout the enterprise.”

Dashboards typically provide activity monitoring and drilldown capability:

  • “The most effective dashboards allow users to drill down into the KPIs to find root cause or areas likely to cause problems. Some can even be configured to alert maintenance or support personnel when performance drops” or dangerous thresholds are crossed. Dashboard also help “make comparisons of multiple data sources” over time. These functions are called business activity monitoring, and when applied to the organization’s network, for example, is referred to a network monitoring.
  • The ability to monitor and manage performance using the dashboard is similar to ability to monitor and manage the organization’s track along it roadmap using EA!
  • The most effective dashboards, like the most effective enterprise architectures, are those that provide information in multiple layers of detail, so that the executives can get the high-level summary, the mid-level managers can understand the relationships between the information, and the analysts can drill down and get the detail.

Dashboards—an effective human-machine interface:

  • Dashboards done right, are an effective EA tool, and serve as a window into the organization’s performance; they provides real-time, summary and granular information for making quick and specific decisions to positively affect performance.

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December 17, 2007

Information Privacy and Enterprise Architecture

The Privacy Act of 1974 states: “no agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains.” However, there are certain exception for statistical, archival, and law enforcement purposes.

What is privacy?

In MIT Technology Review, “The Talk of The Town: You—Rethinking Privacy In an Immodest Age” (November/December 2007), by Mark Williams, the author states Columbia University professor emeritus of public law Alan F. Westin defines privacy as, ‘the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.’”

Do we have privacy?

Already in 1999, Sun Microsystems chairman Scott ­McNealy stated, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.

These days, there is no illusion of privacy, as young people routinely put their biographical details and images online at a myriad of social-networking websites. Moreover, “kids casually accept that the record of their lives could be Googled by anyone at any time…some even considered their elders' expectations about privacy to be a weird, old-fogey thing--a narcissistic hang-up.”

Privacy is certainly not an absolute, especially since we need to balance the right to privacy against the first amendment guarantee of free speech. However, when people think their rights to privacy has been abused they have recourse to tort, defamation, and privacy law.

EA’s role in privacy:

User-centric EA supports the Investment Review Board selection, prioritization, and funding of new IT investments with architecture reviews and assessments; these EA reviews include a detailed appraisal of everything in the “information” perspective, including information management, sharing, accessibility, assurance, records, and of course privacy issues.

Furthermore, more detailed privacy impact assessments (PIAs) must be conducted, according to the the E-Government Act of 2002, “when developing or procuring IT systems or projects that collect, maintain or disseminate information in identifiable form from or about members of the public.”

Although Generation Y does not particularly seem to value their privacy as you'd expect, EA, along with the privacy officer and the chief information security officer, plays a critical role in monitoring and ensuring the privacy of information managed by the enterprise.
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October 12, 2007

Information Management and Enterprise Architecture

What is the Information Age?

“Alvin Toffler, a famous American writer and futurist, in his book The Third Wave, describes three types of societies, based on the concept of 'waves' - each wave pushes the older societies and cultures aside.

  • First Wave—the society after agrarian revolution that replaced the first hunter-gatherer cultures.
  • Second Wave—the society during the Industrial Revolution (ca. late 1600s through the mid-1900s), based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy."
  • Third Wave—the post-industrial society, also called the Information Age, Space Age, Electronic Era, Global Village, scientific-technological revolution, which to various degrees predicted demassification, diversity, and knowledge-based production.”


What is a knowledge worker?

“Peter Drucker, in 1959, coined the term Knowledge worker, as one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace. Knowledge Workers are now estimated to outnumber all other workers in North America by at least a four to one margin (Haag et al, 2006, pg. 4). A Knowledge Worker's benefit to a company could be in the form of developing business intelligence, increasing the value of intellectual capital , gaining insight into customer preferences, or a variety of other important gains in knowledge that aid the business.” (Toffler and Drucker sections are adapted from Wikipedia)

How does EA fit in the Information Age and support the knowledge worker?

EA is a process for capturing, analyzing, and serving up information to achieve improved IT planning, governance, and decision making. So, EA works with data and information and supports the knowledge worker in the following way:

  • Acquisition—captures business and technical information
  • Analysis—analyzes information problem areas and identifies gaps, redundancies, and opportunities for standardization, consolidation, integration, interoperability, and so on
  • Description—describes data and information using metadata and various information products, such as profiles, models, and inventories
  • Classification—catalogues data using taxonomies (i.e. schemas) and ontologies (that relate the data)
  • Warehousing—stores the data in a repository
  • Dissemination—makes the information available for discovery, exchange, reporting, and queries
  • Management—establishes data standards, institutes policies and practices for describing, registering, discovering and exchanging information; administers configuration management of the data; ensures data backup and recovery.


In User-centric EA, all aspects of information management (in terms of development, maintenance, and use of information products) are done with the enterprise and end-user in mind. User-centric EA seeks to make all aspects of EA information useful (i.e. relevant—current, accurate, complete) and usable (i.e. easy to understand and readily accessible) for the information age enterprise and knowledge workers that we support!


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