Corporations and marketing departments have become engulfed by the rising tides of Big Data, social networking, and mobile interactions, says Gartner, and are drowning in technologies for lack of cogent policies to manage them. As a result, the research company predicts that 33% of Fortune 100 companies will face an “information crisis” within the next three years.
“There’s an overall lack of maturity when it comes to governing information as an enterprise asset,” says Gartner VP Andrew White. “It’s likely that a number of organizations–unable to organize themselves effectively for 2020, unwilling to focus on capabilities rather than tools, and not ready to revise their information strategy– will suffer the consequences.”
Gartner explains that by “manage,” it means managing information for business advantage as opposed to merely storing and maintaining data. Its prescription for corporate business leaders is to set up enterprise information management (EIM) functions to identify what information is vital to a company’s success and what isn’t. Gartner analysts approximate that, currently, more than three quarters of individual information management initiatives within the average organization are isolated from each other.
Gartner proposes a three-step strategy to companies looking to avoid a data management crisis:
- Identify the crucial business outcomes that need improvement or are being influenced by poor information management
- Determine the business processes and leaders most affected by those outcomes and study their cases to start setting priorites for an EIM effort
- Adopt a program management approach for EIM to identify work efforts, resource commitments, stakeholder expectations, and success metrics.
“In a digital economy, information is becoming the competitive asset to drive business advantage, and it’s the critical connection that links the value chain of organizations,” White says.
