The challenges of strategic data planning in practice: an interpretive case study

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Abstract

Many organisations have had difficulty with strategic data planning despite strong arguments about its value. A number of empirical studies of strategic data planning have identified various factors important to its success but few have presented detailed contextual explanations. This paper reports an in-depth, interpretive case study which examines the strategic data planning process in a large Australian bank. The paper explains why strategic data planning is such a difficult undertaking and suggests three important implications for practitioners. First, both business managers and information systems staff find the output data architecture difficult to understand, and improved representations and explanations of the data architecture should be used. Second, strategic data planning is a complex social activity and an understanding of the organisational context within which it takes place is critical to its success. Third, strategic data planning may not be the best way to build a data architecture, and other approaches which facilitate participation should be considered.

Introduction

Poorly managed data presents real problems for the management of large organisations. Information from several functional areas within an organisation is frequently required for strategic decisions. For example,

a major bank seeking to shift its strategy toward a focus on customers finds that it cannot determine how profitable individual customers are, or even what its total business is with each customer, because its customer codes are not common across branches or lines of business (Goodhue et al., 1988, p. 373).

This inability to respond to cross-functional questions reduces an organisation's potential to respond to business problems and take advantage of opportunities (Gartner Group, 1993). The goal of data management is to manage data as a corporate resource in much the same way as more tangible assets such as equipment and personnel are managed (Trauth, 1989). Without data management different parts of an organisation will collect and store their own copies of data, most likely in different formats. This leads to duplicated and inconsistent data and difficulty in the consolidation of data for reporting. Strategic data planning is a significant component of data management and aims to align the data management function with the business plans of an organisation and develop a data architecture.

There are strong arguments in favour of strategic data planning and data management (Martin and Finkelstein, 1981; Martin, 1982; Sager, 1988). Empirical studies, however, have highlighted many problems with the use of strategic data planning in practice (Beynon-Davies, 1994; Goodhue et al., 1988Goodhue et al., 1992; Hoffer et al., 1989; Lederer and Sethi, 1988Lederer and Sethi, 1991; Periasamy, 1994). Apart from Beynon-Davies (1994), who discusses the social and political context of strategic data planning in the British National Health Service, most of these studies develop contingency models or identify factors necessary for success in strategic data planning.

This study extends these previous studies. It uses a process-oriented, interpretive case study approach which focuses on the relationships between the actions of stakeholders in the strategic data planning process and the organisational context in which it takes place. The case study analysis explains why strategic data planning is such a difficult undertaking and suggests why alternative approaches to developing and documenting a data architecture should be considered. Results of this study will assist practitioners when considering the use of strategic data planning and indicate areas for further research.

Surveys of management information systems issues consistently rate developing an information architecture and making effective use of data as a corporate resource very highly. These were the two most important issues in the United States survey by Niederman et al. (1991), they were ranked four and six in the Australian survey by Pervan (1993)and they were ranked two and four in the European survey by Galliers et al. (1994). Clearly strategic data planning is an important issue for both academics and practitioners.

The paper is structured as follows. The next section of the paper discusses strategic data planning. Section 3describes the research approach adopted in the study. Section 4describes the case study using a process-oriented framework and analyses the case study using structuration theory. The following section relates the case study findings to previous studies of strategic data planning and the paper concludes with some suggestions for further research.

Section snippets

Strategic data planning

Strategic data planning is a top-down, data-centred approach to information systems planning which focuses on modelling the underlying shared data within an organisation (Goodhue et al., 1992). It is categorised as `technological' in Earl's (Earl, 1993) taxonomy of strategic information systems planning approaches. The principal output of strategic data planning is a data architecture which is described as `a high level map of the information requirements of an organisation' (Brancheau and

Research approach

A process-oriented case study approach has been adopted to enable the relationships between organisational change and the actions of those involved in strategic data planning to be explored. This approach focuses on the process by which the data architecture is built and used rather than on establishing causal relationships between variables (Markus and Robey, 1988). A case study approach allows the investigation of strategic data planning in its natural setting (Yin, 1994). The theoretical

The case study

This section contains a description of the case study based on the framework for understanding strategic data planning followed by an analysis of the case study using structuration theory. Within the case study description the institutional context is described first to enable understanding of the strategic conduct of the people involved. The unit of analysis of the case study is the data administration group and its interaction with project teams. The data administration group is located

Discussion and implications

In this section the case study findings are related to the problems in the literature identified earlier. The discussion focuses on how each of the problems can be explained using the structurational analysis and leads to a number of propositions about building and using data architectures.

Conclusions

Organisations have had great difficulty with strategic data planning despite many convincing arguments which support its use. Strategic data planning is an important aspect of data management which aims to manage data as a corporate resource. Data management enables the provision of accurate and timely data for strategic decision making. This study extends previous studies by using a process-oriented, interpretive case study approach to explain why strategic data planning is so difficult in

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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