Travelling home

I've just checked in at the Arlanda Airport, travelling to Oslo and then back to Washington DC. It's been a couple of days of discussions on the need to better understand and account for data- and information resources.

Common questions are:

1. What kind of, and how much information resources do we have? What information are we responsible for? Is it possible to do an information inventory?
2. What is the current status of our information? In terms of quality, security, governance, legality, volume, costs and revenues (profitability). Where do we want to be in the future?
3. What are the risks, associated with the information? How dependent are we on our information?
4. Who is accessing our information, and for what purpose?
5. Can we estimate a value for our information resources?
6. How can our information be used and exploited to generate revenues?
7. How can we change focus from T to I, in IT?
8. What do we start with, when migrating our legacy?
9. Do you have a tool, to solve these problems?

It's not difficult to find vendors and suppliers that provides technological solutions to information problem. We can produce, store, adapt and publish information almost at the speed of light today, but who can quality assure the content? Nothing guarantees that the information sent to me is the right information at the right time and for the right purpose. In order to do that, we need to improve the connection of reference data, rules and triggers with the models of information and it's instantiations.

The whole purpose is to better understand the information, and to make it a bit smarter that a database. When my services are saving data on new component updates, then triggers will activate the configuration management services, that will update CI-numbers, -dates, -users and these will trigger updates in the verification and certification, and these will trigger...

It's snowing today..

We have a fantastic weather here in the Washington DC district today. It's pretty cold, around 18F and powdery snow, that makes funny noises when you walk on it.

This is the view from our office, overlooking the Potomac River. We are inside, drinking hot coffee, and working with the latest Information Resource Management proposal.