The team and I at Ventana Research through development of new research agendas for 2009 have identified business and technology thematic topics that will be critical to all organizations. These topics will be critical for business and IT to be more educated and savvy on how to leverage them for their organizations. These are our assertions and not just predictions for success in this year and we remain optimistic that business can drive significant change in how they use information and technology to advance their processes and people who operate them along with management who need better tools for being effective in their decisions.
Information Management
The topic itself can garner a heated conversation as many organizations know they do not have a dedicated business and IT management focus on information. Or in some organizations business is not engaged as leading the importance of this focus and leave it to IT to determine what is needed. If organizations do not see and treat information as an asset that can provide value to business efforts then they will gain the full performance and processing potential of their organization. Many organizations see information as data that results from customer or accounting systems like CRM and ERP or what is put into a data warehouse for reporting and not as the foundation for what business needs to be effective. In addition for others it is the massive amount of emails and documents that float across the organizations and fill up file servers. Many organizations realize the Information focus is an Agenda that has not been well invested into as a center of technology and processes.
Many CIO’s are starting to re-address the basic essence of being a Chief Information Officer and making Information Management a top investment priority. This is not easy for many of them who come with experience from data center and networking or part of the enterprise architecture efforts that focused on infrastructure and not looking at the business focus of information and then to what technology is needed to support it. In the last several years we have seen the indication of Business Intelligence as a #1 CIO priority, but you can deliver quality BI without sound information management processes and technology.
As organizations realize that the information asset (comprising of a variety of data assets from their database systems to events from systems and applications to the content across websites and documents from their business systems to the storage of voice data) needs more refined focus and structure to manage the entire life-cycle of information and provide the governance processes needed for ensuring the quality and consistency of it. This shift must not be just a conversation or budget conversation but a dedicated program and process effort with resources that are assigned to a range of responsibilities with a budget aligned to the goals and expectations outlined. As business becomes savvier to the need to better align their technology investments into true information technology that supports information management we can begin to have the tools for ensuring this valuable asset is harnessed effectively. And business will need to examine where specialized technology for managing financial information or customer information assets are required to meet their specific business process and management requirements.
Information Management also covers a broad range of technology that should be part of the IT agenda for business. This can span from the sourcing and data integration technologies that can provide the access including enterprise information integration (EII) and processing of data to the actual storage of data in data warehousing technologies that span from RDBMS and specialized analytic stores. Critical technologies that can help support the data lifecycle include data association and discovery, to data quality, and master data management. For many advanced organizations providing centralized information search on data for business and IT to simplify the access to key information is critical to gain value from existing investments. For others using analytics that can be applied to text, data and voice is also part of finding the business value from the information itself. In addition the management of key data and documents like fixing your spreadsheet problem is a required element of transitioning your organization from these personal information management tools to broader enterprise efforts is essential to business. And now, adopting appliances that bundle in software and hardware can even further simplify the process to advance information management from the storage and analytics to the search and discovery process. I would recommend that you build your information management blueprint that operates across the information architecture that is needed for your organization to be effective in the management of information assets.
Information management is the foundation for business intelligence and performance management processes across the organization. Without the focus on information assets these tools and applications use will not be as effective as they will lack information or have bad information, either of which could be detrimental to your business. CIO and IT management will need to assert a higher priority to this focus or face the continued chaotic business dialogue that does not see the value of the organizations IT budget dollars. Business will need to step up and get engaged and as well the CFO will need to see the value that can be discerned from higher quality decisions from information that is trusted for helping the entire workforce be more effective and efficient.
Is your organization making the information management agenda a top business and IT priority?
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