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November 10, 2005

Metadata Ciphering

Ok, I am slightly behind in my reading so this thought comes after reading the Information Technology and the Board of Directors by Richard Nolan and Warren McFarlan (October, 2005: Harvard Business Review). Overall the article is well written and well thought out. The four modes of operation within the IT strategic grid provide a foundation for the governance of information technology. One of the key components of IT oversight is the inventory of the Assets which applies to all four modes of operation.

The board needs to understand the overall architecture of its company’s IT applications, systems, components, and asset management strategy. The first step is to find out what kinds of hardware, software, and information the company owns so as to determine whether it’s getting adequate return on its IT investments. Physical assets are fairly easy to inventory while intangible assets are not.

The article goes own to tell the reader that the best way to estimate the value of intangible assets is to sum up all of the hard assets and then multiply by 10. You see, I didn’t realize that utilizing enterprise metadata repositories to actually track the inventory and develop ROI methodologies based on reuse, transaction volumes, etc. could so easily be done with a six grade education and advanced ciphering (Thank you Jethro B.)

Physical Asset * 10 = ROI (Enterprise Metadata)

Posted by Todd at November 10, 2005 11:47 AM

Comments

Posted by: David Eddy at November 22, 2005 3:43 AM