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What is Organisational Data Management and Why Does It Matter For Program/Project Controls?
HKA Tech's Travis Hamera provides insights....
Program/project control systems like PMWeb allow project teams to consistently manage and monitor the core elements of project management including scope, budget and schedule. They provide day to day tools to support these efforts while additionally creating a consistent process and repository for an organisation to have visibility into not only the individual projects but across their entire organization. These are typically complex tools used to manage activities that are both complex and data/process intensive.
So how can this truly provide the executive/organisational transparency without requiring senior managers/directors to learn “yet another system” for occasional access and review? And what about the information from all the other enterprise systems that are related? Systems such as:
- Financial Management/Accounting
- Construction Scheduling
- Asset Management
- BIM
The answer is to prepare and implement an organisational data management strategy to address the following key components:
- Data Access: Data should be visible and accessible to those who need it to make well-informed decisions across the business
- Data Quality: Data should be reliable, trustworthy, & auditable
- Data Analysis: Data can tell us what is and is not working within our process / procedures
- Data Visualization: Need to be able to “see” what the data can tell us
There are many tools available to support the strategy. The key is to utilise a tool that allows each organisation to build their organisation data model (a mapping and centralised data warehousing of key information across all related systems). The following is a simplified model:
One example that is typically already available to most organisations is Microsoft’s Power Platform. The Power Platform is tightly integrated with tools such as Office 365, on-premise or cloud application databases, and even local data such as excel spreadsheets. There are various tools available to manage the cleansing/preparation of the source data, transforming the data and transporting to secure data storage (such as Microsoft’s Azure data solutions), and finally modern applications to view and access this rich data cloud. For many organisations, the initial licensing to access, store and view their organisational data model is likely already included within their current office 365 services.
