Would you allow this…?

One of the greatest factors which can lead to the degradation of quality of information relates to the behavior of users, data administrators and external parties. I have referred to this in a previous post “There is no such thing as a data quality problem…” which was deliberately being a little provocative in order to make a point. In this related post I will explore an interesting contradiction in staff behaviours related to physical assets and behaviours related to information assets.

As some of those who know me will appreciate, a lot of my experience relates to the world of physical asset management and maintenance management, however, some of the points I raise also relate to more general business contexts.

Why application based user groups do not work

Many larger organisation with enterprise wide applications set up user groups to promote application usage, to help resolve system issues and to help plan future enhancements to the application. These groups, in my experience, do not deliver suitable business benefits and can either become a ‘talking shop’ or an excuse to berate the IT department/directorate consequently, the wider business does not see them as adding value.

In this blog post I expand on the nature of the problem and make suggestions for a better approach.