Enterprise Imaging: Governance, Strategy and Resources

Enterprise Imaging (EI) engages many groups from within the organization. Pulling all these people together and developing consensus requires engagement, communication, commitment and a structure for the creation of a strategy that will benefit the entire organization. This blog looks at the process above in greater detail.

Governance

• Has the organization created one or more governance bodies?
• Has a governance body been created for EI?

Organizations that adopt an EI strategy and implement a Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) are quick to realize the importance of having a representative governance committee in place to develop a strategy, timeline, and budget for a successful EI solution. The EI governance can be standalone or a specialized subset of an existing overarching enterprise governance body. Representation from all specialties wanting EI is as important as the participation of the information technology (IT) department. An excellent example is Kelly Johnson, the founder of Lockheed Skunk Works, who realized how important it was to have designers, engineers, materials engineers, pilots, and technicians work side by side in order to create the incredibly advanced planes that came from that collaboration.

The governance committee should be formalized with a written charter that is approved by C-level management.

Strategy and Scope

One of the first orders of business for the governance committee is to develop and approve a strategy with a defined scope for EI. At this juncture, all areas of IT should join in to ensure the future EI environment integrates well into the longer-term IT strategies and addresses security, compliance, system architecture, data storage, data management, data quality, data redundancy, information life cycle management, and high availability.

The strategy document should be signed by members of the governance committee and form the basis for moving forward with the development of a multi-year budget to implement a plan for execution and high-level timeline.

Resource Commitments

Aside from the technical parameters, governance should ensure all parties participating in establishing EI will commit resources to participate in the planning, documentation of current state workflows, the development of future state workflows, testing, validating data migrations and training users during go-live. Governance should also ensure funding sources are established and how the cost of adoption will be split amongst the participants. Very often EI is seen as an enterprise investment and is carried by IT. The specialized systems that attach to the core architecture may be carried by the departments if that is how the budgeting is done.

Getting the formal structure established creates the foundation for building out EI.