Inside NIRMA Magazine Summer 2018 - FINAL

Kings and Kingdoms
Continued from Page 16
run” while another
kingdom is
responsible for
“keeping it new.” Meanwhile, the corporate kingdom
just wants to understand the financial implications that
their combined assets will deliver. But each kingdom
needs to have information from other kingdoms to
make better decisions and achieve the organization’s
corporate goals. So, to continue our parallel between
government and organizations, what would that model
look like?
In a world that is
increasingly going digital,
building a connected data
environment is the answer
that enables the federated
kingdoms to find their
greatest value.
Federated Kingdoms
The European Union was intended to be a federated
trade organization. The target was not to usurp or
overthrow existing kingdoms and their governments.
Instead, the concept was to enable federated kingdoms
to work together and improve their economic
prosperity, first through reducing trade barriers and later
by solving additional objectives that the member states
deemed important. What could this model tell us about
how organizations might solve the “kings and
kingdoms” problems that exist today?
Every “kingdom” within an organization exists for a
reason and brings with it some strengths. What is
“missing” is the common federation between those
kingdoms that enable this expertise to be leveraged most
efficiently to achieve the common, corporate-wide goals.
In our analogy, this would equate to dropping trade
barriers between nations to eliminating information
barriers across an organization. So, what if there were a
way to “keep the kingdom” where that makes sense, but
still obtain this idea of a “federated set of nations” that
work together to obtain higher goals than any individual
kingdom could ever obtain or the “non-federated” set
could ever achieve?
It is this concept of “federated kingdoms” that
results in the need for a connected data environment in
today’s organizations. Unlike the traditional “common
data environment,” which implies single repositories of
truth and “single sovereignty” over information,
connected data environments enable organizations to
determine where sovereignty over information quality
and consistency should live. Digital workflows enable
each kingdom to manage their part of information
quality while ensuring that other kingdoms are not
negatively impacted by unmanaged or unplanned
change. Digital contexts then enable each of the
federated nations to leverage the combined, consistent,
and trusted information to make decisions related to
their own individual needs, while also ensuring that the
organization’s larger contexts are also visible, actionable,
and sustainable. Through federated information
management, organizations can leverage the expertise of
their teams and develop best-practice, discipline-specific
workflows, while enabling the organization to leverage
the vast knowledge existing across the federated
kingdoms. This results in better visibility and better
decision-making.
So, is it time for a revolution?
Should we storm the gates of each kingdom within
an organization and dethrone the existing government?
Or, should we consider how to build our own
organizational unions, leverage the expertise of various
disciplines, and federate them into a more powerful
organization that manages and distributes information
across the organization to achieve the desired outcomes.
In a world that is increasingly going digital, building a
connected data environment is the answer that enables
the federated kingdoms to find their greatest value.
Jim Newman is senior director of product management with
Bentley Systems. He can be reached at
jim.newman@bentley.com.
Inside NIRMA NIRMA.org Summer 2018 17