Information Development using MIKE2.0

Available from all major booksellers including Amazon.

MIKE2.0 (www.openmethodology.org) is a wiki for information and data management professionals.  It was established in 2006 and has been adopted by businesses and government departments around the world

To complement the website, Andreas Rindler, Sean McClowry, Robert Hillard and Sven Mueller have assembled some of the most used elements of MIKE2.0 into a handy guide: Information-Development using MIKE2.0 (Motion Publishing 2013).  The book is aimed at anyone who is tackling a project that incorporates complex or impactful information.  It doesn’t matter whether information is at the core, for example as with a data warehouse, or if it is something that needs to be engineered into the solution, such as with an ERP.

While information has been around since the dawn of time, humans have only in the past few thousand years managed to accumulate it in such large quantities that it needed management. And we accelerated that accumulation beyond anything imaginable just a few decades ago.

Over these pioneering years, many people came to the Information Management challenge from different angles.  There are those who built the early database systems, those who came from traditional library science disciplines and there are those record managers responsible for semi-structured data.

This is where MIKE2.0 comes in.  Born of a need for consistent terminology, it has grown to provide a common method, architecture and techniques.  In its early days there was an enormous temptation to seek a mandate a standard, but the community has recognised that the most successful techniques win their place in common use through their inherent usefulness rather than seeking a mandate of authority.

After introducing the concepts behind MIKE2.0, the book provides a comprehensive implementation guide which runs through five phases of the iterative methodology that sits at the core of MIKE2.0.  Any project team will be well equipped to tackle their project after drawing on this material.

MIKE2.0 provides more than a methodology and the book goes on to introduce the SAFE architecture, a capability framework that is applicable to every organisation.  SAFE (Strategic Architecture for the Federated Enterprise) helps align disparate vendors, projects, business rules and models across complex enterprises.

As a wiki, the MIKE2.0 site has grown to have over a thousand useful articles contributed from professionals around the world.  The guide has tried to pick some of the most referenced of these and included them throughout the book.  For instance, it includes techniques for valuing information, picking the right metrics for governance, using a packaged data model and creating a knowledge “market”.

A book can only ever be a static resource, even if it is periodically updated.  It can, however, serve to help educate and then aid the navigation of the larger body of knowledge that is MIKE2.0.  The authors have been passionate advocates of a common approach and collaboration in information management and will regard this book as a success if it helps the website continue as successfully as it has done since 2006.