Kinsmen Group’s recent Seven Summits Tour introduced an interactive and practicable approach to conquering engineering information management. But did it work?

SEVEN SUMMITS OF EIM MATURITY – A CLIMB WORTH MAKING?

Kinsmen Group’s recent Seven Summits Tour introduced an interactive and practical approach to conquering engineering information management. But did it work?

There are countless articles and models that offer a method of plotting your information management maturity position including some that are specific to engineering information. But how many have managed to accurately map their business challenges and needs to these? More often than not, they are too high level to really get a handle on and are therefore difficult to sell to management.

The Seven Summits Tour, making stops in Houston, Calgary and Aberdeen provided us the invaluable opportunity to validate our EIM Maturity model with asset information management professionals and users representing 28 organizations from multiple asset intensive industries.

The aim was to interactively road test the model to enable readers to get a grip on the many factors affecting the accessibility and integrity of engineering information by dealing with today’s immediate issues and planning for the immediate and longer term future.

By using the scaling of the seven summits (the tallest peaks in each of the seven continents), the model identifies the seven critical areas to success. And it worked!

In our experience, all too often organizations have failed in their mission to solve their issues when it comes to structuring, storing and managing their engineering information. Information that really is an asset, but is rarely seen that way.

We found many have implemented information systems to solve a point solution but found they didn’t solve the bigger issues, or devised what could be great EIM strategy but failed to communicate it across the organization.

Others faced organizational challenges where teams were unable to influence beyond their own department so achieving goals across the organization is near impossible.

Through the well-defined and clearly structured maturity model Kinsmen Group has devised a new approach to an age-old problem showing why it matters to solve seven key challenges if we are ever to succeed.

During the tour, session attendees were able to immediately map where they see themselves today, and think about where they need to be and when, all while allowing for the fact not everyone needs to reach the top of every summit or every challenge.