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Thursday, June 04, 2009

Information Management isn't just for Compliance

At least according to an HP global survey.

A global survey undertaken by HP found that less than half of business decision-makers have a high confidence level in the quality and accessibility of information within their organisations.

The survey, and the linked article seem very focused on the need to retrieve information as part of an e-discovery request, or compliance measure, but the concept that this many organizations don't really know what data they have or how to get it also dovetailed nicely with an article my boss had sent me earlier in the week about the software company Autonomy. Specifically, this quote:

"Look at the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that are driving a lot of this compliance business. That goes back to Roman law and is the basis of the discovery process and it makes sense, particularly in simpler times," Lynch said. "But imagine today the role of IT in trying to track and store and catalog and find every voice mail, every Word doc, text message, etc. It often leads to a type of legal lockdown where companies feel paralyzed because they just don't know how to get started or how to ensure they have all that unstructured data and can index it and find it.

"And we think our potential is that once companies have done that type of work for legal indexing, then they can use it afterward for many other things, primarily to get a richer and more-complete view of customers. For example, on average, large corporations today have 9,000 systems across the enterprise, and all of those represent some sort of architectural silos that resist or confound efforts to see and interact with customers in a unified way."

Solid information management isn't just about compliance and e-discovery, even if that is the primary motivation right now. It's about imagining all the things you could use that data for if you knew what it was and how to analyze it. So maybe e-discovery readiness isn't just about the costs versus risk of litigation, maybe e-discovery readiness can also be about getting to data that can grow your business? Turning a cost center into a revenue center? Priceless... ;-)