- Information in Practice
- The 5 Questions
- Today's Answers
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The 5 Questions
Based on the condition of most corporate information environments, I remain amazed that many organizations spend millions of dollars to reengineer data and process structures without considering the need for an organized information picture. Data warehouses, ERP systems, CRM initiatives, and e-commerce applications, to name a few, are the results of redesigning systems to make information analysis easier. My fellow consultants and I have yet to meet an organization, with or without these improvements, that can answer our trademarked 5 Questions:
What data do we have?
What does it mean?
Where is it?
How did it get there?
How do I get it (go get it for me!)?
At best, organizations can answer these questions within a limited scope. For example, in the world of desktop computers, we can instantly get a list of the files on one or more hard drives (What data do we have?). Also, by clicking on the filenames, we can instantly open them (How do I get it?). Of course, the information we desire must exist in a file and must be part of the immediate file environment. But the way to get to the file is so inherently simple that the rules for obtaining and guaranteeing this simplicity are even simpler. Note the model in Figure 3. To accomplish this simplicity, all files must be named and associated with a file type, and that file type has one and only one access procedure. Why isn't it this easy with all of our data? To answer this question, we will refer to this example throughout the book.
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Figure 3 A file system model.
In today's information environments, the answers to these 5 Questions, when and if they can be answered, reflect tunnel vision (for example, one data warehouse, one decision support tool display, one program library). More and more tunnels lead haphazardly to partial answers to one or more of these questions.