Thursday, October 19, 2006
I've been thinking about this post for months, and I've started it probably three times. I've always stopped because I just can't get it right. Well, in the interests of moving on, I'll just spit it out.
The scope of tasks performed by IS departments do not match the usage patterns of information in the organization.
What I mean is this: IT departments are so concerned with business as usual - maintaining the network, tending to corporate apps, generating new ones - that they haven't realized that their organizations are driven by ad-hoc spreadsheets, lists and documents that their users create for themselves and use on a daily basis. These expedient documents exist in a domain totally separate from the officially sanctioned world of the corporate IT department. They replicate and extend much of the information contained within official corporate apps, but the process of getting the information into them is entirely manual. And of course, time-consuming and error-prone. Going further, there is a lot of very useful date tied up in those documents, but there's no way of pulling it into the corporate infrastructure and using it.
Information silos. We're all busy churning out information silos.
The scope of tasks performed by IS departments do not match the usage patterns of information in the organization.
What I mean is this: IT departments are so concerned with business as usual - maintaining the network, tending to corporate apps, generating new ones - that they haven't realized that their organizations are driven by ad-hoc spreadsheets, lists and documents that their users create for themselves and use on a daily basis. These expedient documents exist in a domain totally separate from the officially sanctioned world of the corporate IT department. They replicate and extend much of the information contained within official corporate apps, but the process of getting the information into them is entirely manual. And of course, time-consuming and error-prone. Going further, there is a lot of very useful date tied up in those documents, but there's no way of pulling it into the corporate infrastructure and using it.
Information silos. We're all busy churning out information silos.
Labels: Observations
