You are correct. Putting information quality issues into the language of the business, and pursuing quality for the sake of business benefit not an “academic” ideal of perfection is the key thing. I wrote about this at length back in 2006 in the IAIDQ newsletter (a 4 article series starting with this one, followed by this, this and finally this). The theme forms part of one large section of the report I wrote for Ark Group last year, and is the bones of this presentation I gave in London last year.

The idea of the “Value Proposition” is originally from Michael Lanning (ex McKinsey) and was introduced to me by Andrew Griffiths of Findwatt.com back in 2007 when he served on the IAIDQ Board of Directors (he’s ex McKinsey as well). There is a slide in the presentation about the evolution of Polariod cameras which I think should be thought provoking for Information Quality professionals. It’s based on Lanning’s discussion of how value propositions need to change (but updated to reflect Polaroid’s current direction).

Jim – Superlubricity… that is now “my word for the week”. And O Brien’s law is OK… it has an apostrophe, just one indicating the possessive case not one suggesting your country was held captive by an invading force for hundreds of years leading to the near destruction of your native language. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Note: I forgot to synch up the audio for the presentation and upload it to slideshare… it will be on my list of things to do over the weekend. I promise.

An investment in information quality provides the superlubricity (yes, that’s a real word) the organization needs to greatly reduce the friction caused by poor quality information.

Perhaps we should call this Daragh’s Law of the Conservation of Information Quality?

We couldn’t call it O Briens Law because that would violate the Law of the Missing Apostrophes…

I certainly hope that IQ is a recession proof profession – I am not good at doing anything else.

Best Regards…

Jim

Excellent, thought provoking post. The challenge for us information quality professionals, as it always has been, is to speak the language of the business (i.e. provide bottom line business impact of issues), rather than require business people to speak the language of the Information Quality profession.

This is seldom easy, since the same information quality issues give rise to different business impacts in different Enterprises, or even in different business units within an Enterprise.

Rgds Ken