Utilize one Consistent, Complete, and Accurate Business Information Base

By Harry Greene

Information capital today is not created or supported to provide solutions for business results and to integrate business information

Enterprises are not able to properly develop, support, integrate, and apply information capital today. Enterprises have much to gain by properly organizing and leveraging information to provide value. Information is not managed properly for support and utilization in today’s enterprise due to several major problems:

  • Each management structure and information system laid over the business defines and describes the enterprise with its own set of data entities and entity definitions
  • The business is not organized and managed to capture information produced directly by the business and to apply information directly to the business
  • There is no specific organization set up to properly support each category of information capital and provide information solutions to produce results
  • There are no integrating business data entities to integrate information from the various systems into an business information base for management information and effective collaboration
  • Much essential financial and statistical business data on result value and quality, capital worth and utilization, and performance cost and effectiveness is never captured or reported
  • Many potential information solutions for operations and management that can help produce high value-quality results are never provided

The enterprise today works around the information complexity problem and suffers from the lack of complete, consistent, and accurate information that can be solved only by eliminating these problems.

R-pM provides the means to manage and utilize information capital as an integrated Business Information Base

The answer is Result-performance Management, to organize information to be managed professionally as business data, human knowledge, facility records, and management intelligence and to integrate information capital by specific business entities to be delivered as information solutions to produce results. R-pM focuses information technology utilization on actual business details and eliminates excessive information technology utilization for structures laid over the business.

Information capital is supported by professionals with the proper capabilities

The fact is that different kinds of information require different professional capabilities to manage and support. Much of our traditional information handling is based on this. Data is managed different from accounting records and knowledge. Problems arise when the wrong capabilities are applied, such as having accountants provide management intelligence. From the management perspective, we have four types of information that must be managed separately: data, knowledge, records, and intelligence.

R-pM applies the proper capabilities to capture, create, and maintain information, and to provide information solutions through four capital result units:

  • Business Data Unit: to manage and support business data entities and solutions and to integrate or provide access to knowledge, records, and intelligence
  • Human Knowledge Unit: Manage and support the development and provision of knowledge solutions to enable human capital to utilize solutions and produce results
  • Facility Records Unit: Manage and support financial and non-financial records from planned and actual business transactions and provide record solutions on business status for management and governance
  • Management Intelligence Unit: Capture external intelligence and derive intelligence from data, knowledge, and records for management information beyond the business status

Data requires business understanding and analytical ability, knowledge requires human development and education skills, records require administrative ability, and intelligence requires research and management analysis ability.

Information must be captured directly from the business and applied directly to the business

Conventional information systems do not capture data directly on the specific economic output results produced by the business and the specific invested capital utilized to incur costs and create the value in the results.

By now, you should be familiar with Result-performance Management to directly organize and manage the business, which is generally defined today as "the activity of providing goods and services". The business of any enterprise is made up of three components:

  • Results: The economic outputs produced by the business. Subsidiary information is maintained on individually-managed results like products, services, material, orders, revenue, etc
  • Capital solutions: The invested capital utilized by the business to produce results. Subsidiary information is maintained on individually-managed solutions like employees, supplies, equipment, cash, etc
  • Performance domains: The utilization of specific capital solutions in business activity to provide specific goods, services, and other results

The business is organized as enterprise business structures. Within the enterprise business structure, information is integrated by result and capital solution. Performance domains maintain data and generate transactions on planned and actual business performance. Related entities may provide details on certain results and capital solutions. The only other data entities used to manage the business are business descriptors such as industry, region, segment, product group, etc for data entity attributes; time periods used to plan and manage results; and enterprise such as subsidiaries and projects, supplier for input results and acquired solutions, solution provider for external or outsourced solutions, and customers for final results. Other entities may be maintained for data and other information of interest to the business.

Information is integrated in an Business Information Base to produce results and to support management

Today's information systems are laid over the business and support other overlaid structures for organization, strategic planning, business processes, accounting, performance management, management reporting, etc. Each system defines its own set of data capture and reporting entities like division, objective, process, object, activity, etc. This leads to the business and information complexity problem and requires additional overlaid systems to reconcile, integrate, and drill down various information entities to provide management information. These additional investments have never been able to solve the problems.

Business Information Base Overview

R-pM integrates information by business data entity for utilization in a seamless Business Information Base. R-pM relates all information to the business data entity, so that it is provided when and where needed. R-pM controls access to the Business Information Base as a business data result. R-pM creates and manages a Business Information Base that is supported by professionals and that is utilized to add value to results and to provide transparent management information. R-pM requires reference from business data entities for all information in any media related to the business entering, within, or leaving the enterprise, including image, video, emails, Internet postings and downloads, file transmissions, and off-line documents.

The Business Information Base employs existing information technology in general ledger systems, existing applications systems, and relational database capabilities. The Business Information Base is built gradually as the actual business is learned and organized and then refined and improved as the business is managed.

The R-pM Toolkit provides the know-how to build and utilize the Business Information Base

Details on how R-pM solves information complexity and inadequacy problems and how to build your Business Information Base are provided through your R-pM Toolkit subscription.

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