In the past few weeks I have presented training sessions on data governance, master data management, data quality and analytics at three different venues. At each one of these events, during one of the breaks a variety of people in my course noted that the technical concepts of implementing programs for any of these practice areas seemed straightforward. However, many of them suggested that the value of implementing any one of these programs and delivering high quality data and analytical reporting appeared to be constrained by what I have frequently referred to as “the last mile” – getting the consumers of the data to take advantage of actionable information.

One perceived reason for this phenomenon was that the business users are somewhat detached from the production of the information product, and when presented with more trustworthy information or better analytics, they neither understood why the result was more desirable nor changed their processes in reaction to the information improvements.

As an example, consider a sales process analysis that scores sales prospects in relation to their perceived needs, their predisposition to purchase a product and an understanding of their funding cycle. Depending on the industry, the salesperson may have hundreds, if not thousands of prospects in the funnel, yet most salespeople naturally gravitate towards those prospects that they believe to be the most promising. That means that the analytical model may be presenting valuable insights, yet those insights are being ignored because the intended beneficiaries of those insights are not prepared to react to those suggestions.

In other words, achieving the desired outcome of instituting good data management and analytics practices is limited by the desire of the users to change their behavior to accommodate actionable knowledge. And during a conversation I had with a colleague at one of the training events about information architecture, my colleague coined the phrase “behavior architecture” to refer to the way to engineer the consumption of information and change the target’s behaviors to benefit from that information.