Raging economic, financial, legal and regulatory pressures on businesses have increased attention and reliance on sound information management practices. Business workers' need for real-time information is no longer considered a nice to have – they demand access to accurate information at their fingertips to. Compounded by the increasing speed of business and the volume of information created across a variety of organizational platforms and application silos, numerous access points and inefficiencies result in information chaos. Surprisingly, it is not the volume of information that is the cause, rather, it is the lack of controls to manage information through its life cycle. Symptoms of poor information control include data redundancy, duplicate content generation and data residing in multiple locations.
As companies continue to acknowledge these concerns, they are caught in the common “low hanging fruit” trap of implementing basic data management practices to address this issue, mistaking data management for information management. Existing information silos result in the proliferation of various data management systems, inconsistencies between information sources, increased ongoing operational and maintenance costs, and eventually disgruntled employees. Ironically, these impacts could altogether be avoided had the issue been treated as an information management problem from the onset.
Information management can be defined as interdependent practices and technology designed for the purposes of aggregating, processing, synthesizing and distributing information with a goal of achieving front office and back office efficiencies. In reality, lack of focus on sound information management has resulted in mismanagement of information, lack of vision for how to address the ongoing generation of information, limited areas of efficiency gains and larger overhead in other areas, causing management to question the true value of these programs. These consequences are further exacerbated because information takes many forms and the sources of information are varied increasing and ever-changing. This is a result of execution and not an issue with the concept. A true information management strategy incorporates these considerations and is scalable and flexible to adapt accordingly with relative ease.
Developing An Enterprise Information Approach
Given the economic conditions and growing corporate sensitivity to technology expenditures with budgets being aggressively slashed, corporations do not have the luxury to start afresh and implement information management befittingly from the ground up. With minimal funds to appropriate, IT leadership is forced to move forward and make do with existing technology stacks and practices (such as master data management, warehousing and data sanitization) and exercise creativity in how it improves upon these areas. Armed with the correct perspective of information management, there are a number of gradual steps that an organization can take to advance at an enterprise level without having to incur the hefty costs and resource investments of an information management overhaul.
A critical key to addressing information management is understanding what constitutes enterprise information and its characteristics: 1) How is it generated – internal and/or external, 2) How it evolves 3) What its dependencies are, 4) How is it consumed, 5) How is it distributed, 6) Its relevance, 7) What makes it discernible from other types of information, and 8) its shelf life. The intent is to understand and document information flows and maps, creating an enterprise information view of what the organization considers information (and relevant characteristics) across all major processes. This view also needs to account for department-specific information for value-add activities.
For larger organizations, this process may be a daunting task. To simplify the effort, organizations should identify what it considers to be information and evaluate its scope in this context – is it based on geography? Is it based on lines of business? Or can be evaluated as an information flow that courses through various functional areas (such as lease billing which gets its start from the execution of a contract). By dividing information into smaller chunks, creating an Enterprise Information View becomes more manageable and contained.
Once the information itself is understood, the EIV enables the scrutinization of the current application architecture (which depicts the data management landscape) to: 1) demonstrate gaps in information 2) identify data that does not need to be saved 3) pin point redundancies and as a result, highlight areas of improvement. Ultimately, this will offer insights into which applications could possibly be enhanced, combined, integrated and/or replaced to streamline and tighten the information management process.
An Enterprise Information Management Case Study
A global manufacturer had a geographically distributed organizational structure. Information was contained in multiple silos – division, business unit and individual levels. Even though IT was se tup as a centralized shared services model, each business unit used and maintained its own stack of applications, platforms and technologies. IT had already spent a significant amount of time and money building a Web services-based integration model in an attempt to tie these disparate systems together. But the promise of integrated systems was woefully short, because Web services still involved static code that required customization and significant ongoing maintenance. Information was duplicated in multiple places, and the organization had even developed different sets of controls for the same piece of information, in an effort to comply with regulatory requirements. To compound matters, users were allowed to create and set up their own collaboration sites with little to no oversight. The organization soon found itself overtaken with a proliferation of sites with various levels of objectives, information, controls, access and use. Additionally, the organization was also knee deep in regulatory and litigation issues and required a large multi-million dollar budget just to support its ongoing e-discovery and search needs. Given this scenario, how does one create information harmony in the organization?
The organization's leadership quickly recognized the need for information control management to reduce costs and streamline its operational processes. An information control SWAT team was established consisting of key stakeholders representing various lines of business: legal, compliance, audit and IT/information architects. The team was given a 45-day window to synthesize the issues and develop recommendations to improve information management across all information sources. The team was chartered to analyze applications/systems, information sources, repositories, data warehouses end-user created tools and usage patterns across the spectrum of the company. This work was significantly aided by the fact that IT already had an inventory of systems that the team was able to leverage as a starting point. The team met with end users, line managers and senior management to understand how information was produced, accessed, updated and disposed through an EIV. Existing document, content and records management applications were also reviewed for usage and user adoption to understand what currently worked well.
