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The value and accuracy of information as it relates to business performance measures,
or how it aligns with organizational business strategy are the questions in the
minds of today’s business leaders. Due to the nature of the current business landscape,
which is global and extremely competitive, businesses are required to take an enterprise
view of its information assets.
According to Gartner, Inc., Enterprise Information Management (EIM) is an "organized
program to design, catalog and safeguard all of a company's information assets -
including content found in databases, transaction systems, data warehouses, documents
and rich media - to maximize their value, usefulness, accessibility and security."
Even though, most companies have some level of a formal EIM program in place, the
EIM efforts are inadequate to meet changing or growing informational needs. Today’s
business needs a transformation in the culture of EIM - how it's done and how its
value is perceived enterprise wide.
To achieve excellence in Enterprise Information Management, an organization will
need to adopt a roadmap that will show a multiyear process - an information management
journey that is prioritized based on business value and vision. There are three
vital elements in this effort:
- Current State Assessment: An information management assessment is required
to evaluate the organization's current capabilities in several areas, like Information
Metrics and Processes, Information Infrastructure, Information Consistency, Information
Governance, Information Delivery, Information Metadata, Information Quality and
Information Privacy and Security.
- Future State Vision: Creation of the future state vision by analyzing the
portfolio of EIM projects based on the areas targeted for improvement or immediate
business needs. They may be standalone projects, for example, information quality
projects to address a significant business issue or a part of a larger project,
such as an Enterprise Business Intelligence Implementation.
- Roadmap:An implementation roadmap that focuses on the sequence in which the
future state can be achieved in an incremental manner, without impacting the current
business functions. In laying out this roadmap, important factors to consider include
the organization's business model, past actions and future plans, business imperatives,
technical dependencies and the requirements of projects already underway.
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