The essence of an information strategy
"As it stands, within the past few years, a number of organizations have started to implement an organizational information strategy. These companies recognize that information is an organizational asset and should be maintained as such. They also recognize the lack of a central strategy has created major problems across the organization."
"All information in an organization should meet a certain standard for quality. It should be delivered consistently across the organization, i.e., asking for the same information in different divisions should yield the same result, and users and applications shouldn’t have to wait long to get their requested information. "
"As an analogy, one could compare information in an organization to water in a typical metropolis. In the old days, as people built a house, they’d also dig a well in their backyard to reach water needed for drinking, cooking or cleaning. This water was hardly shared and was not necessarily clean...//...as people matured in the art of city planning, we learned to think of water as a common utility and to integrate, clean, and distribute it from a central organization in the metropolis."
"You might say that we, as the residents of a metropolis, have an unsigned contract with our metropolitan water department to provide us with clean, consistent, and timely water. Basically, regardless of where you are in the metropolis, you can trust that the water is consistent, has met certain level of quality, and if you open the faucet, it will flow.""The same applies to information in the organization. By implementing the same principles as our city planners, we’d be able to capture, integrate, and cleanse the information in a central repository, and to deliver it to our internal and external users in a clean, consistent, and timely manner."