Cover Story
Information is a strategic asset for any organization. Business processes heavily rely on information (both structured and unstructured) not only to execute but also to govern, innovate and make decisions. According to a recent AIIM report, compliance and risk are the largest driver for information management and has risen sharply in the past year from 38% to 59%. Fifty five percent cited cost and productivity improvement as their biggest driver of digital transformation. There are over 14000 federal state laws, standards and regulations governing the management of information. 49% of organizations believe that unauthorized access by internal staff poses the biggest threat to their data. Antiquated document imaging systems can create vulnerabilities that increase the risk of compliance violations and data theft. Several scanning and capturing solutions have no encryption at all with unsecured log files and weak security management.
When it comes to information, it is not only about making it available at the right time to the right user, but it also needs to be relevant, accurate and trustworthy, to then be called a truly valuable commodity. There is still a lot of chaos within enterprises with respect to how information is managed – for example, easily finding the right content that is secure and intended for the right users is still a huge challenge. Also eliminating ROT (Redundant, outdated and trivial) information from time to time, and ensuring adequate governance and compliance is still an on-going process within enterprises, with a long way to go to reach the desired end state.
One of the key elements in any digital transformation journey is information management strategy and execution. Content is created by various stakeholders both within and outside the enterprise. This is often a collaborative exercise, and there are various participants to review, edit and approve the content. Mobile use is pervasive and whether it is emails or access to enterprise applications and information, reliance on security and governance must be adequately addressed. Search, retrieval and access to information are important elements to execute processes, remove duplication and becomes extremely important especially during a litigation and discovery. If every piece of information is not properly found or presented, it could cost enterprises millions of dollars. Information could be residing in several repositories hidden behind firewall or as siloes of information within individual functions. Again, dissemination of information could be done via multiple channels including company databases, company intranet as well as external repositories. Some of the information could also feed into other applications assisting a business user to seamlessly undertake business processes. In addition to the way information is created and used, consideration must also be given to a strong infrastructure that is designed to support today’s as well as future needs relating to scale and growth.
For instance, take the example of information management and its impact to bring down the supply chain costs for enterprises. Enterprise supply chains are believed to be the most important transformation for companies over the next five years. In a recent research Enterprise Digital Supply Chains (DSC) is believed to lead to a 20 percent reduction of procurement costs, 50 percent reduction in supply chain costs, and an increase in revenue of 10 percent. This is believed to be true across all industries, even some, like financial services, that traditionally don’t include supply chains in revenue generating strategies (source: The Digital Supply Chain initiative (DSCi), a new line of research conducted by the Center for Global Enterprise (CGE)).
The first step in this journey is to have a solid Information Management (IM) strategy to ensure the creation of a flexible workplace to enable and capitalize opportunities for sharing information and ensuring an agile process. Such IM strategy should not only define what the future state should look like, but importantly base this on a clear articulation of what the current state looks like, what improvements are required and how the change management will be led.
- Identifying current state:
This stage entails a detailed study of information flows from systems, applications and between people collaborating on business processes both within and outside the enterprise. Content types, the people involved and organization structure is clearly articulated. Challenges with the existing process, business drivers for change and its impact to the enterprise is also clearly understood, agreed and documented. At this stage, it is also important to understand how various applications and systems are aligned with the existing process and what if any, bottlenecks exist.
- Define the success metric and key goals:
At this stage, the success metrics and goals are defined, based on which the program will be monitored and assessed. Detailed tangible target measurements will be articulated at this stage.
- Identify critical stakeholders, skills and communicate
The skills required to manage and lead this change together with identifying critical stakeholders is important to then communicate and get buy-in to make this change happen. Communication is very key to the success of this program, and ensuring that they understand the significance and have conviction to make this change happen is imperative.
- Blueprint and roadmap
A detailed blueprint that encapsulates all the various tasks needs to be put together, including
- Business case and justifications
- Senior management buy-in
- Technology landscape and assessment
- Inventory of information assets
- Information Management Policy including statutory and regulatory requirements
- Records Management policy
- Taxonomy and Metadata models
- Imaging and capture
- Collaboration, search and email management
- Records Retention and Disposal Policy
- Information Security that manages risks while protecting costs
- Infrastructure requirements and dependencies etc.
- Define to-be processes to interact with the new information management policies and systems
- Automating workflows requires a lot of planning to ensure that everyone agrees with the process
- Risk assessments and address all dependencies
- Remote and mobile access and how it would be handled
- Technology assessment and procurement
- A detailed evaluation of the various technologies and selection of the right one is paramount at this stage to the success of this program.
- Ensuring that the infrastructure is in place
- Planning for integration and benefit from legacy applications – ease of integration
- Implementation and support
- Change Management: The importance of ensuring that the stakeholders join hands to make this change cannot be overemphasized. As always, change is the most difficult. Managing culture change and ensuring that adjustments with respect to procedural or technology adoption takes place with minimal disruption will be critical.
Just like enterprises have accounting systems, HR and ERP systems etc. to manage financial, human and physical assets including their associated data, they do need to have the rigor and discipline to create an information management strategy and systems to manage information assets. There is a real revolution going on with respect to the sheer volume, velocity and variety of content with new regulations, data and information coming from various applications, machines and people. Business process agility is intrinsically linked to the way information is managed and best leveraged to generate maximum returns for an enterprise.