So what is information management? Well, at its most simple level, information management is all about getting the right information to the right place in the right format, when the business user needs that critical data.
When you look at the IT market over the last twenty years, the singular focus has been on an application centric agenda where people have been focusing on re-engineering their company based on the application they use. A lot of businesses have now gone through that cycle and have implemented new technologies, the problem that they have is, that while they have new systems, new processes and new applications, the data that they have in those new applications is still the old legacy data they had in their old systems, this means businesses are now looking at it to be able to add value to their company by the data they've got in there and what they do with that data, businesses are now waking up to an information centric agenda having moved away from an application centric one.
In essence there are two types of data, the first is structured data that the market refers to as data and then there's unstructured data which market refers to as content. The third component that then derives out from the data and content is information and information is the value you derive from your structured data and unstructured content.
There are four or five main components that are now recognised as part of an information management strategy. The first one is data management, which is the management of large databases, the second is enterprise content management which is the management of all sorts of data which you have all around your business, the third is business intelligence and data warehousing which is the corporate memory and understanding where the business has come from and then the final components are master data management and data quality, master data management - from getting a single view of a product service or customer base which you work with and data quality which is inherent across the whole of your IT systems.
Information management is also a critical component of data governance, without having a clear defined information management strategy you cannot control what data you've got, where it sits and what you can do with it, this is the fundamental tendency of a data governance strategy, this means there has to be a coexistence between data governance and information management, without the two things working in harmony, both will fail dismally.
Most businesses will inherently know the issues of not having an information management strategy and would be able to see that every day, they would see profits declining and competitors taking marketing share. An information management strategy and an understanding of what your business is doing, who its doing it with, and when its doing it, is a critical component of an information management strategy.
