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Overview 95

The team can then determine where the benefits are that have been identified and start to discover
points where DG can affect or ensure usefulness of data and content. After a thorough understanding of
the business needs, metrics, and organization goals, they can go to the last activity in this phase and
place a value on the organization’s DG program.
Activity Summary Table

Objective Start to tie DG into meeting business needs.
Purpose Familiarize the DG team with business needs and deepen
the position of DG as a business program.
Inputs Organization goals and objectives, business cases, and
ROI documents
Tasks 1. Review business documents, earlier findings.
2. Confirm future relevance of goals and objectives
to DG.
3. Confirm measures of goals and objectives.
4. Clarify possible DG role in achieving business goals.
5. Ensure each goal or objective is measurable.
Techniques Interpreting business goals and objectives into metrics
Tools Excel, Word
Outputs 1. Business goals and objectives, findings from earlier
activity
2. Confirmed business goals relevant to DG
3. Metrics for confirming business goals
4. DG roles in achieving business goals
5. Confirmed metrics
FIGURE 9-3
Activity Summary Table.
Business Benefits and Ramifications
There are benefits to examining benefits. If the DG team is not tuned into business needs, it will start to
see where they can clearly speak to the value of DG. We are astonished in our DG practice as to how
many employees in all varieties of large and/or well-known companies have no idea where the
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company is supposed to be headed.
Besides the ultimate assignment of some financial value to DG, the business gets the material to
think of DG as a business program versus an annoying IT effort.
Approach Considerations

This is not a “read-it-on-the-train” activity. It is a “team-around-the-table” activity. There should be
a summarization and presentation of the business programs that may require the application of DG to
their information underpinnings.

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While it is poor form to do so, we often want to take executives aside and educate them that the idea of informing
employees of business goals is a good thing. They have a “need-to-know” or “elitist” mentality that assumes the person in
the mailroom is incapable of understanding the goals of the company. While we certainly understand the need to keep
strategy close to the vest, sharing the bigger picture with employees is an incredible contributor to an effective culture.
(Everyone else will read about the strategy on the Internet anyway.)