Information Sharing White Paper

DoD ASD(NII)/DoD CIO requested the Association for Enterprise Integration (AFEI) Information Sharing Working Group (ISWG) to bring together senior leadership from the public, private and academic sectors and to produce recommendations and a check list for implementing governance within large, federated environments. Authors have been Bryan Aucoin and Jarl S Magnusson. In line with DoD Information Sharing Strategy, the ISWG focused on governance concepts and approaches that are:

• Self-forming, self-organizing and self-regulating;
• Required to support the establishment and maintenance of trust relationships for sharing;
• Agile: supporting rapid change in business/mission requirements;
• Light-weight: can be reliably implemented with minimal additional administrative burden;

The key conclusions of this paper are as follows:

• There is one “one-size fits all” style of governance. The style of governance must be tailored for the state or phase of evolution of a given federation as it form and self-organizes.
• The end-game of the evolution of a federation formed for information sharing is information stewardship. Information Stewardship is a best practice based upon empirical assessment of Information Technology (IT) governance.
• This paper defines the concept of a “meta-governor”. The role of a meta-governor is guide federations through their evolutionary processes toward information stewardship.
• The paper provides guidance, in the form of checklists, for meta-governance, federations, and information stewards.

Information Quality

Information quality is about the right information and information that is right, for the right people, and at the right time

• The right information means that it is the information that is required to support decisions in a process, that its meaning is unambiguous, and that it is complete
• Information that is right means that the process for creating and maintaining the information is defined and followed so that the information is accurate, and consistent.
• For the right people means that those who need access have it, and equally, those who should not have access do not.
• At the right time means that the information is available when decisions relying on it need to be taken.
  

Victims of poor information quality

We (DNV) have been victimized due to negligence from web-providers of address information. When people are searching for Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) here in Alexandria, then our DNV-address pops-up. So, we have had a lot of citizens and officials calling and visiting us here at our location, and when we tell them that we are DNV not DMV, they usually get quite upset, with us.!!

This has been going on for more than six months, and we have talked to information providers like Switchboard and White Pages, but they have not yet been able to correct the problem.

We have not been able to identify where the information originates from and who's responsible (who should pay the penalty) for it. An information provider sells this type of information to a lot of service providers and with poor information quality will this problem affect even more people in the future.