When decision making becomes personal - Corporate Information Cancer
Permalink 
0 comments, add yours
I did that sad thing again today and Googled myself. I came across some comments about one of my blogs on Daragh O Brien's blog titled The evolution of Information Quality.
So what you may ask? I was reminded of an observation by Colin Rickard (DataFlux) in his presentation at this weeks MDM Summit in London. I can't remember it word for word, but it went something like - it's taken us twenty years for companies to have reached today's level of maturity, it will probably be another twenty before the promises made by the 'Information Age' are realised. This suggests that the 'Information tipping point' I talked about, is still some way off!
I and other Information evangelists like Darah could now be wrong? The corporate information blockage may not be the lack of understanding and investment in data and information, but could in fact be the company bonus scheme which blights us?
Personally, and sadly, I think this 'root cause' is now probably too big for big business and Governments to fix - even in the next 20 years!
My changing view is that because of 'City greed' and their yearly bonus systems, the companies they invest in have adopted the same, blunt, short term measures and rewards systems. Decision making is not unsurprisingly aligned to achieving these short term, personally focused and largely inappropriate bonus targets. Information which could damage personal bonuses is therefore suppressed. Good MI projects are doomed before they start.
Worse still, this reward system has now been adopted in the public sector. This is one of those schemes that will be heavily protected by all those that prosper.
So what can be done to kill this ‘information cancer’?
How's this for an idea? Get Central Governments to decide on what it is that today's personally incentivised and focused senior exec should be asking about it's end-to-end business, and increase regulation and compliance reporting requirements to ensure companies ask the right questions of themselves!
There are many reasons why this is a really great idea! As far as I can see, compliance projects are the only information management projects that companies manage to align their silos on and work together to solve - These projects manage to cut through damaging internal politics, and use BI tools effectively to produce information – A sad but true fact :-)
And before you go on about the role of balanced score cards, dashboards and KPI's... All they currently serve to do is strengthen the silo decision making issues! - The Board divi up the targets, Board members then cascade these through their silos: The IT Director cascades his/her targets to their team, and the Finance Director cascades his/her targets to their team - Poorly thought through and implemented KPI's only serve to strengthen silo based decision making and silo focused politics - all of which supports their (personal) bonuses, and negatively impacts business effectiveness and efficiency!
So then, either companies outsource the setting of 'good business practise' to Government, or they develop measures and rewards systems which incentivise corporate focused decision making based upon the facts.
