IT is from Mars and your Information is from Venus

"Information structure , Sure, no problem , got that covered" says the Enterprise Architect as you ask about the alignment of the Business Classification Structure and metadata to the IT technology that has being proposed for the Pan Galactic rollout that you have just heard about.


"It's all just a quick review and we get on with. The vendor told us it will be easy", he adds, almost without taking a breath. After wondering that maybe you are in different solar systems, or different companies you race off to see how wide spread this IT selection disease has become.

Does this sound like your situation? Scary as it is, it is still be played out across companies of reasonably large size as we speak.

IT selection alone will not solve an information problem that you have. In treating the information just as a bit or a byte ultimately the thinking will by default go to a technology only "Storage Bucket" view.

Maybe this is why most technology only selections seem to fail, or why IT seems to get impatient with information management people who see the need to get a clear understanding on the complex mess of connections and associations between information in a contextual way.

By focusing only on product (technology) not the capability that it can provide you to assist in the management of your information in context you will replay the IT solution that fails over and over again. Only when you realise that there are two planets involved will you start on the right path to providing a working solution.