Information is the foundation of every organization. Those with accurate, reliable and timely information have an economic advantage over their competitors. Best practices, found within best-in-class organizations, dictate that information be treated in the same manner as other valuable assets and, regardless of their type, assets require careful management, thoughtful governance, and strategic consideration in their use and control.
The reverse is true as well; organizations that apply lax, ad-hoc or hurried methods to their information management practices find that business critical information is unavailable or worse, lost at decision time. When important information is locked in silos and cannot be shared across the enterprise; information trustworthiness (a good measure of quality) is low within user communities, vital processes dependent on this data are the source of exceptions requiring manual intervention and result in inefficiency and profit/revenue loss.
Skilful information management improves organizational efficiency and business results by delivering measurable competitive advantages such as; customer intimacy, supplier optimization, risk mitigation, data-driven decision support and internal transparency. In fact, any business output that is dependent on the delivery of quality, trusted and timely information to the right user or process at the right time in an understandable and interpretable way requires good information management practices.
The Gartner organization defines enterprise information management as “An integrative discipline for structuring, describing and governing information assets, across organizational and technological boundaries, to improve efficiency, promote transparency and enable business insight.” Gartner goes further to say “organizations integrating high value, diverse, new information types and sources into a coherent information management infrastructure will outperform their industry peers financially by more than 20%.”
In other words, good information management is about delivering business insight using the full set of information, and it makes a significant impact to an organization’s performance if done well. Our Semaphore platform helps organizations integrate all available sources of information; structured and unstructured, into a coherent information management platform to aid in making data-driven business decisions to increase revenue and outperform their competition.
