Business Transformation: A Roadmap for Maximizing Organizational Insights

CHAPTER 3

Challenged Organizations: When Rugged Individualism and Department Silos Aren't Enough

What we've learned so far: People, information processes, technical infrastructure, and culture are the pillars that organizations must strengthen to gain insight from information and use that insight to make sound decisions and validate strategies. The best way to do this is through an understanding of an Information Maturity Model, an unbiased, vendor-neutral approach that allows each organization to craft its own roadmap toward information maturity. The maturity model uses levels that each organization can assess their maturity against.

You might be tempted to skip this chapter, as it describes organizations with significant information maturity issues. You probably don't think your organization is that bad off. Think again. In a recent report, Gartner expects that by 2015 20 percent of Global 1000 organizations will have established a strategic focus on information infrastructure equal to that of application management.¹ That means at least 80 percent of the largest companies don't have that now. Since four out of five of you are likely in these circumstances, reading about the Challenged Level organizations will help you get a better understanding of where you stand today.

Organizations stuck at the Individual Level operate in a near total enterprise data vacuum even if they are ...