Smart Data: Enterprise Performance Optimization Strategy

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.

JAMES A. GEORGE is a performance improvement consultant to the federal government and commercial customers. He is presently Director at SAM, Inc., Rockville, Maryland.

JAMES A. RODGER, PhD, is a professor in the MIS/Decision Sciences Department of the Eberly College of Business and Information Technology at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He has done consulting work for the Department of Defense, among many other federal agencies.