“Information is a corporate asset” is a mantra that many IT people have been chanting for years. Recognition of information as a real corporate asset would give the IT industry a new status they have longingly sought for decades. However, what kind of asset should it be?
A drill press is an asset and so is a pile of cash. A drill press can be used to efficiently perform one specific type of a manufacturing process and a pile of cash can be used to accomplish almost any business objective in any line of business. If information is rigidly structured, it looks a lot like the drill press. If it can be accessed in any way, at any time for any purpose, then it is more like cash.
Obviously, information should be an asset like cash but in most organizations it is much more like the drill press. An EDW that has been built on standard RDBMS structures is optimized for one set of functions and generally performs them well. However, these structures handle different information functions about as badly as a drill press would perform injection molding.
The value of the information asset is directly related to the flexibility of access the business has to that asset. The more flexibility the organization has to using the information, the higher its value will be. If a business person can see a fixed report that is produced each day and all other information comes from phone calls, the information asset has very limited value. If that user can see a dashboard that indicates a problem or opportunity and then immediately begin analyzing the detailed information behind the dashboard, the information has much more value.
However, if a new business opportunity comes up and the decision makers can find answers to all of the new questions associated with that opportunity in time to make an informed decision, then the information has almost unlimited value. This means providing answers to questions that no one thought of just one day earlier much less at a requirements definition meeting eighteen months ago. It means accessing data through paths that no one thought of in any design session. And it means getting answers to these unplanned questions at the speed of thought.
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