COVID-19: An opportunity to revisit Information Management?

Covid-19 took the entire world by storm, and it goes without saying that the negative impact has been huge. Companies are still coming to terms with the impact that the pandemic has had, and is having, on their business. For some, it has been an opportunity to think about different ways of working. McKinsey estimates that businesses’ digital adoption jumped five years forward in just eight weeks at the start of the pandemic. It’s important to reflect on what lessons we can learn from these experiences.

An inflexible need….for flexibility

Flexibility is clearly paramount to success. In an uncertain economic climate with no clear end in sight, despite vaccination programmes being rolled out globally, the businesses that survive and even thrive will be those that can pivot. The specific nature of this will differ for every company – we have seen some divert from the goods and services traditionally provided to new offerings, while others have up-ended their go-to-market strategies. However business flexibility is applied, one thing is certain – data must be used to inform these decisions. To take this one step further, high quality data must be fed to the relevant teams to enable optimal decision-making.

Prior to the pandemic, it’s safe to say that the good information management practices that enable the creation of this high quality data were lacking in most sectors. Good information management means having a clear model for your domain, and structuring data in a consistent and detailed way. Data that is well structured and well described is the only kind of data that can have true portability – the ability to carry its context and meaning across different business functions and applications.

Why now?

Ten to fifteen years ago, well-structured, well-defined, fit for purpose data was less important than it is now. Indeed, a well-designed relational database could cover most corporate data needs. Since then, the data landscape has changed massively. Not only is there simply much more data that can be stored and analysed, but our needs to move, repurpose and integrate data for a variety of use cases have dramatically increased.

Until the pandemic, information management practices have not kept pace with these needs. If anything, they have become comparatively worse, as more and more faith has been put in technology to fill the gaps created by poorly structured and described data.

Covid-19 and the ensuing chaos across the business community has put a spotlight on the lack of good information management practices. The need for accurate and accessible data has refocused attention on the ease of moving and integrating data around a business, and as such, dramatically boosted internal initiatives in this space. The recent rise in the popularity of knowledge graph technology, a knowledge base that uses a graph-structured data model to integrate data, and the parallel rise in job openings requiring familiarity with it in progressive organisations such as Apple, clearly demonstrates this.

Two specific concepts that contribute to good information management practices have become more widely understood by the business community since the start of the pandemic in particular. First, data improvement initiatives can be progressed remotely. Not needing to have people on-site for this kind of work reduces risk during the pandemic. Second, data improvements are low-risk investments. There is no commercial downside to having cleaner, well-structured, and generally better data, as it enables more detailed insights and therefore improved decision making. Even better, significant capital expenditure in technology is not needed.

What next?

Assuming that the business community remembers the lessons learnt during Covid-19, there are huge rewards to be reaped. Increased utility of data is often viewed as a benefit in and of itself, but for me, the true rewards are what this enables.

The ability to combine and analyse data from different sources, only possible with well-structured, well-defined, portable data, improves time to market when developing new products. Companies also secure a deeper understanding of their data assets, as they are better described. Furthermore, good information management practices enable businesses to integrate with larger data ecosystems outside of the company. This is important from a commercial point of view, as it gives companies the ability to improve their offering by augmenting it with external data and / or systems, as well as identify new routes to market via integration with existing products. These are benefits that will give a business an edge during Covid-19, and, importantly, when we are out the other side.