This book is written for enterprise executives and addresses the single most important activity for which they are ultimately responsible—optimization of performance. Whether you are an executive of government or commercial enterprise, or any other organization, your primary aim is to maximize return from limited resources to accomplish the unique mission and goals of your enterprise. Optimizing performance means applying scarce resources to business processes under constraint and transforming them into highest yield and best use outcomes by managing people and enabling technology.
Our aim in writing Smart Data is to contribute to the optimization of enterprise performance with a strategy that will vastly improve enterprise data resource management reflected in more efficient and cost effective information technology (IT) support that produces high impact results for executive and operations management users. “Smart data” describes data that have been engineered to have certain superior characteristics and that is a product of state-of-the-art data engineering discipline such that it is interoperable and readily exchangeable among qualified members of an enterprise user community. Smart data is an executive strategy and tool for exacting higher performance across the enterprise. It operates by leveraging stateof-the-art infrastructure and enterprise services.
The authors advocate attention to smart data strategy as an organizing element of enterprise performance optimization. They believe that “smart data” as a corporate priority could revolutionize government or commercial enterprise performance much like “six sigma” or “total quality” as organizing paradigms have done in the past. This revolution has not yet taken place because data historically resides in the province of the information resources organization. Solutions that render data smart are articulated in “technoid” terms versus the language of the board room. While books such as Adaptive Information by Pollock and Hodgson ably describe the current state of the art, their necessarily technical tone is not conducive to corporate or agency wide qualitative change.