Documents vs data - a distinction that has to go to enable the information management professional of the future

I’ve frequently heard the critique that a Chief Information Officer is really a Chief Technology Officer - on the basis that they don’t seem to spend much time on the information, or really understand it. Personally, I think we’ve created that problem, and when I consider our professional groups, I see the same kind of issue -

• Records Managers (unless the records are in a database)

• Information Managers (unless the information is in a database)

• Data Managers (unless the information is stored in a document)

Records Managers - ‘organisation, evidence is our bag, we can talk evidence all day long - unless it’s stored in a database. Regulators, courts and the general public might not care about the format, but we do - so if it’s in a database, you have to talk to the data management team - but they don’t understand evidence, so you won’t be able to have a sensible conversation with them’

Information Managers - ‘information is data with a context that can only be provided by documents. Yes, we know that business applications give data context, and even the structure of the tables in the database give the data context, but the only context we’ll talk to you about is the context offered by documents, file structure and other metadata’

Data Managers - ‘we’ll manage the data for whatever purpose you want, unless it’s in a document’.

We might think that the distinction makes sense, but what it actually does is force people with low expertise to do the heavy lifting. It means that a business manager has to come to us to ask how to achieve a result - and we’ll tell them how to achieve it with documents, then they have to go to a data manager and ask them how they’d achieve it, then they have to do the heavy lifting - the analysis of both ways of achieving the result, and the decision about which to use.

How do CIO’s often manage this decision?

They’re executives - so they’re working with the blunt instrument of capital allocation.

When records, information and data professionals can’t get together and develop a well integrated solution, CIOs just allocate capital to both information and data storage - so we get business systems that don’t consider how the document based parts of the process will be managed, and we get information systems that have no form or structure, and in-general, much less budget overall. To be fair to CIOs, we don’t help them decide - every business system has a business case attached to it, they know what it does, why it’s needed and the processes it manages. The file storage just has a lot of space, grows constantly, and there’s not really any sense of the value it adds or subtracts.

This isn’t a problem that’s going to change on its own.

It’s a problem that won’t change until we do.

Things will get better when one of two things happens - we get information or data professionals deciding to take responsibility for both, or we get information and data professionals agreeing that both are valuable, and agreeing that they will always work together. The end product of either of these approaches should be either a well integrated solution, or a clear reccommendation that it’s best served by either documents or data.

Either way will mean that our organisations can come to us for help improving results with their information, and that’s the only future I can see. The only real question is how long it takes us to get there.