Information or Systems?

For those of you who work in I.S. or I.T. or any of the variants, a question. Is your organization about information or is it about systems or maybe it's about technology?

My sense is that many more people are in it for the systems (programming) or the technology (networking, servers, wires, boxes) than for the information.

Just to get all the cards on the table, I'm asking this from the perspective (there's that word again) of someone who has been having his nose bloodied for years because of a stubborn streak that keeps on insisting that it is about the information and that everything else is supporting cast, walk-ons and extras (the Academy Awards are a recent memory).

The term, ontology, has become trendy in the relatively recent past. It simply means a specification for a concept. A concept is an idea and many times it never progresses beyond that. Rarely, an idea like freedom or liberty needs little or no specification to make it useful, Many ideas, like stewardship, on the other hand, need quite a lot of specification before they become useful.

Information Systems/Technology appears to be in need of some onological work. I.S./I.T. are ideas that require a context. They are found in the context of a business. The business, in turn, has a context but we don' need to go that far for the purposes of this discussion.

Businesses need to produce, dispense, store, manage many kinds of things and all of them are physical save one--information. Because information is a concept in its own right, it quite often gets pushed out of the way in favor of the physical things that compete for our attention by virtue of form, color or sound. These things require physical space and unless we do something, they will soon pile up and make it impossible to get anything done.

Quiet information or data, on the other hand makes no demands and is consequently ignored. Remember, though, that the business has an I.S. or I.T. organization because every now and then someone needs a specific piece of data or a chunk of information and needs it now. Sometimes the data has just come into existence and other times it has been languishing in a "data file" for days, months or years.

How do we find that set of ones and zeros and turn it back into the concrete abstraction that the business needs? Friends, that takes data as well. Device names, drives, folders, files, instances, records, fields, indices, values--all of that is data. In I.S., we understand the need to keep that kind of data reliable. We create systems and they are data as well. We understand the need to maintain our system data: product, version, build, component, QA status... and the implications of not doing so.

Frequently the Data people (data administration, data architecture, data stewardship, data governance, database administration...) are part of I.S. or I.T. and we're content with that as long as they are directing their attention outward, toward the business. As soon as they begin to exhibit interest in us and our handling of our own data, we start to feel resentment, frustration and even anger. "Who are they to tell us how to do our job?"

Friends, and I am sincere in my use of the term, programming is programming and data is data. The Data people can help you and they want to help you and, most of all, they need to help you in order to close the loop. They are being held responsible for the quality of the data resource and the processes that create and manage the resource. You represent a huge exposure as far as they are concerned. When you re-learn to associate your system with the information that flows through it, I hope you will also learn to value what the Data people are offering.

Information Systems, Information Services, Information Technology: let's refocus on the reason and purpose of those efforts. You can benefit from the consistency that results from standard processes. You can benefit from better data management capabilities. We can all benefit from understanding our shared purpose--the best information for the business we're part of.