Information Management Pitfalls

With the overwhelming growth of data, information and its lifecycle become more complex.

Information Management makes information available and useful to run a highly responsive digital business. Information Management is the overall process of aligning the use of information through management, assurance, and involves the use of technologies and processes with the aim of optimizing the business value that is generated. The problems most organizations have are silo data or outdated information management approach. How to avoid the following pitfalls in order to improve the overall information management effectiveness?

Lack of a good information strategy: With overwhelming growth of data, information and its lifecycle becomes more complex. Organizations need to have an Information Management (IM) strategy as an integral element in the business strategy. Because often, not understanding why they need to manage data cause a lot of confusion and unproductivity. Information savvy companies can respond promptly to the emerging events or continuous digital disruptions, information-based insight enables business moving faster and acting smarter. A well defined Information Management strategy clarifies the business goal behind IM, diagnose the current IM issues, as well as how an enterprise will leverage information to power its business via optimizing the value of information while minimizing risks. Too many businesses are data rich but insight poor. Or they spend so much time and energy collecting data for that "just in case" scenario, without unlocking the full potential of information. Most organizations are in transitions, data is in dissimilar systems that are being migrated, converted, or just staying out due to budget and time constraints. Therefore, information strategy is the key ingredient of business strategy which enables executives to make data-based decisions and build up an analytics-driven culture cross the organization. It determines the strategic objectives, their risk appetite for achieving them, identifies and assesses the risks, and make sure it’s all joined up.

Poor information management scenario: Information is growing exponentially, and it is humanly impossible to explore all of the "art" out there around a subject or technology. Information Management is the overall process of aligning the use of information through management practices. Information management (IM) concerns with the classification, manipulation, and dissemination of existing recorded information. Thus, Information Managers need to keep checking: What data do you have, in what format and the location and method it is held? ASSURANCE (Data held is safe, secure and processes are legislatively compliant) and EXPLOITATION (Collaboratively enabled and fully support the business objectives). Functional silos, overly rigid processes, or outdated best practices are all root causes of poor information management as information has the characteristics of velocity, variety, and viability. Thus, the effective and productive Information Management activities & scenarios should understand and manage complexity, know how to prioritize based on the business needs, communicate extensively, focus on information adoption to ensure right people getting the right information to make the right decisions for solving the right problems; be able to mitigate risks and deliver tangible and visible business benefits and improve user experience.

Poor measurement of Information Management: The value of information management must be qualitative, measurable, and defined uniquely by an organization. First, work to identify how information is associated with the tangible value of businesses; and define how you will measure success in meeting the business purpose and vision. Information flows in business processes, then its own value will become readily apparent and quantifiable by association. The insights obtained from data mining needs to be converted into an actionable plan and results/ outcome validated in terms of financial figures. Like measuring many other business initiatives, you put the effort into taking the correct measurements, collecting the data obtained, analyzing it, evaluating it, determining what needs to be improved, determining what the actions are to improve it, assigning actions to perform the improvements, continue to measure the results and make adjustments for making improvement. Keep in mind, the measure selected should be part of a link of cause-and-effect relationships, and ultimately affect the growth and long-term perspective of the organization.

Given the value that information is playing in the innovation and growth of organizations today, the intention of Eco-Information Life Cycle Management (Data-Information-Knowledge-Insight) is to build a high intelligent organization in which people can make information-based decisions timely at the different level for responding ever-changing business dynamic and building long-term business competency.

Posted in: Digital Pitfalls,Information/Data Management,Lessons from Failures