Introduction
This is a short intro. This post is primarily about the concept of an “information production line” in organisations and the risk we face when we let our view of quality management of information become one of better inspection of defects out of a process. However, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t also a chance for me to trumpet a good news story about innovation and general cleverness in a young Irish software company in the Information Quality space.
The Information Production Line
Modern businesses rely on the flow of information along a production line. In this production line, data and information are taken, acted upon, combined with other elements, shared, and applied to produce value for the organisation.
Whether it is a sales lead being captured, an order being taken, a product specification being produced, or staff member being hired, information is captured, created, consumed and processed at each stage in the production line from entry to delivered objective.
Everyone and their dog agrees that the best practice and optimum strategy to ensuring quality at minimum cost is to apply your quality metrics and remedial actions as close to the point of first creation as possible, with the ideal being to have zero defects entering your process flow in the first place. Vendors often talk about the “information quality firewall”. Emphasis is placed on the importance of good governance over the information asset to ensure and assure quality. Increasingly emphasis is being placed on the importance of building information quality processes into ETL operations and into data migration strategies.
All of which sounds great and is a significant step forward from where we were 5 years ago. However, are we simply reaching the point where we are starting to pay to have people running around the edges of our production lines sweeping up the crud that falls off the line or sifting through incoming parts bins to seperate out the “good” information parts from the “bad” information parts.
But is that really managing the quality is is it just being really good and very fast at wielding a big dustpan and brush around our information processes to keep the factory clean without actually tackling the real root causes of poor quality? Given that information is created through the operation of processes that are often many steps removed from the final ERP or CRM system (such as spreadsheet based order forms or product specifications) is it good enough that we are relying on inspection effectively at the end of the line to fix our quality problems? (more…)