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Overview 99

Business Benefits and Ramifications

This step captures, in business terms, how the enterprise needs information and content to achieve its
objectives. The DG (and all of enterprise EIM) can be tied back to this list, ensuring that information
assets are used and managed to meet business needs.
Approach Considerations

This activity should take only a day or so if the business plans are readily available. Otherwise, it may
take between one and two weeks, depending on the span of DG in the organization. The most time-
consuming efforts in this activity will be document research and review. Additionally, if interviews or
reviews of findings are necessary, additional time will be required for scheduling sessions with
management.
When you do not have access to business plans, you need to take the “guerilla approach” to
business directions. The DG team should look outside your company at the business environment.
Mass media, trade publications, and regulatory filings are excellent sources of business-direction
tidbits that can be used to support information asset management and DG.
“Business drivers” can also be a vague term. Most organizations have goals and objectives or
strategies. There are many layers to corporate and organizational strategies. Most list drivers as some
sort of influencing factor. Therefore, be cautious of semantics. A great deal of the time, goals,
objectives, and/or drivers can be discerned from corporate documents. The key is to look for material
that lists or implies measurable goals and objectives. There are several fundamental reasons to take
this perspective:
• The ability to share data is not of prime interest to a CEO. What is important is lower costs and more
revenue. Period. If sharing data leads to those, fine; if not, don’t bother them.
• Most executives have been interviewed into a stupor. However, few DG or EIM teams know enough
about the business to replace executive insightdso other techniques are called for.
Business measures (and BIRs in general) are objective, and we always end up with the same level of
information from exhaustive interviews. Your collection of objectives and goals will be decomposed
into their component parts. It is the nature of these component parts that indicate where DG will be
needed. If you are in guerilla mode, it will become evident very soon that you are collecting real
business drivers versus ones that cannot be decomposed. For example, if you start to nose around and
are compiling drivers like the following, then you are barking up the wrong tree:
• Inability to share information across the organization
• Multiple inconsistent sources of data
• Lack of ability to generate reconcilable financial reports

What you are really getting are requirements of some EIM-type project, and this is not suitable
material for business alignment. What component parts of “better access to data” can be governed?
This activity also requires the team to examine where the business objectives, BIRs, and business
activity intersect.
Once the goals and objectives are discerned, then it is very important to consider what the
enterprise is like with IAM. Where does IAM fit into the current business? This means we need to start
to recognize specific actions that the business will take. This also means creating a list of specific
activities where the business will use information to accomplish goals. Feel free to use business use