Summary of Key Points

Strategy

• Understand the underlying business need and ask "Why are we doing this?"
• Negotiate the environment and determine who has stake in this and why.
• Account for existing infrastructure, practices, history, and culture. This is working in the real world.
• Look ahead to keep one eye on the future.
• Devise a clear approach and plan then share it with stakeholders.

Policy

• Information policies guide decisions about how, why, when, and by whom information is used.
• Information policy principles rest on fundamental democratic principles.
• Stewardship encourages policies that regard government information as a public good.
• Usefulness principle promotes policies that encourage the innovative use of government information to improve the quality and lower the cost of government services.
• Policies should ensure good quality and ready availability of data for action.

Data

• Data issues are the biggest challenges to government agencies transitioning from legacy, stovepipe systems to integrated systems.
• Data quality goes beyond 'clean data' to evaluation of data for 'fitness for use'.
• Data that is not used cannot be correct for very long.
• Laws of data quality apply equally to data and meta data.
• Lack of data standards is a significant barrier to information use.
• Meta data is critical when dealing with data quality and data standards.
• Understanding the complex program environments within which the data is used is as important as the quality of the data.

Cost

• Managing relationships with team members, project sponsors, and external stakeholders are hidden costs that must be addressed.
• The greater the different between old and new work processes, the higher the cost.
• Identify the gap between the technologies you have and the technologies you want. Costs will increase with the size of the gap.
• Separating independent tasks into parallel efforts helps control costs.
• Integration is costly. Know what you need to integrate and how much.
• Identify the differences among your data resources. The greater the differences the more it will cost to integrate them.

Skills

• Organizations, like people, are information users.
• Skilled information users define problems, select information, analyze, interpret, and present results.
• Every project involves five kinds of skills: analytical, information management, technical, communication and presentation, and project management.
• There are a number of ways to acquire necessary skills.

Technology

• Technology choices affect an organization's current and future capabilities.
• Technologies become imbedded in every aspect of the organization including processes, user practices, and infrastructure.
• Technology can change the way government does business.
• Technology can improve customer service and streamline administration.
• Technology can help government solve complex problems.