CIOs face a problem of managing systems across a proliferating set of channels and platforms. Ted Schadler of Computerworld has a cool name for the problem: he calls it the Splinternet. He notes that the Splinternet is a rerun of the early days of ecommerce, with a different cast of leading characters. Where once companies struggled to align their web presence with their traditional customer communications, now they're trying to orchestrate relationships across Twitter and Facebook while figuring out where to spend their online advertising budgets.
Schadler doesn't mention business-to-business applications, but the Splinternet effect is happening there too. However, it's harder to see the problem in b2b. Data exchanges via XML business standards such as ACORD have streamlined inter-company communications and made new business relationships possible. That's a success we can all feel proud of.
But too much b2b data communication takes place through unstructured data. Now, there's a place for unstructured data. In the insurance business, a photo of an accident scene, for example, can give vital information about an event. The kind of unstructured data I'm referring to as problematic is business information that's embedded in text or loaded into a handmade spreadsheet. And the reason this kind of data worries me is that it's pseudo-unstructured data. It's data that started life with an objective meaning that's been destroyed by the method of transmission. Dump data from a system into a spreadsheet, and you strip it of its semantics. Quote data in an email and you do the same thing. Such practices rob data of its role in information systems. It's a kind of dumbing down. You could even call it vandalism.
I guess we can't un-invent email or outlaw comma delimited files. But we ought to educate our colleagues about the wastefulness and riskiness of exchanging business information via ad hoc channels. CIOs could usefully do a little traffic analysis to get a handle on the scale of the problem in their organizations. That's one big way they could serve the strategic aims of the business.
Many organizations wage an ongoing war on waste. It's time we declared some rules of engagement around copy and paste.
Comments