Not my problem
Jinfo Blog

8th November 2007

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Flexibility and adaptability have long been the hallmarks of the best information professionals – if only to avoid the swing of the axe, when management misguidedly believes that the information department doesn’t contribute to the bottom line. So when anyone says ‘not my problem’ in the context of corporate information management, that’s the time for us to prick up our ears. Prick them up, then, for a panel discussion on Information Governance: Tips, Tricks and Best Practices, to take place at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Cannes on 6 November. Hosted by IT research and advisory company Gartner www.gartner.com/eu/symposiumfall the event will feature the company’s prediction that 90% of organisations that don’t approach their information management in a coordinated, enterprise manner, will fail in their first or second year. ‘IT professionals have focused for too long on technology and not enough on information,’ says David Newman, Gartner’s research vice-president. Lack of information governance affects the bottom line, he continues, claiming that companies in North America have lost more than $600 billion in revenue as a result of poor quality data. ‘Most organisations manage information in separate silos: system-by-system or department-by-department,’ Gartner continues. ‘The result is a lack of consistency, transparency and quality of information assets across the organisation.’ Not surprisingly, Gartner has its own solution for this – enterprise information management or EIM, which it describes as a ‘framework for managing information as a corporate asset’. The need for such a practice may not exactly come as a dramatic revelation to seasoned infopros – but it does offer an opportunity in the light of Gartner’s prediction that, through 2009, growing demand for consistent and transparent information management across the organisation will force EIM to mature as a discipline in 60% of Global 100 companies. Alongside accuracy, integrity and accessibility, security is naturally one of Gartner’s essential building blocks – and a further report, based on a YouGov survey for IT service provider Dimension Data www.dimensiondata.com finds that an increasingly mobile workforce is largely left to its own devices when it comes to the security of their organisations’ information assets. Over half of workers polled accessed company information from home, on a computer that just over a third shared with other members of their household, the survey found. Forty per cent regularly used inherently insecure and eminently losable memory sticks for moving data. It’s not the first time this issue has come up recently – take a look at http://web.vivavip.com/forum/LiveWire/read.php?i=369 for an American example. Coupled with the YouGov finding that 21% of UK workers say their organisation’s security policy is either not communicated very well or else non-existent, there’s another opportunity here for infopros with an eye on what security and compliance concerns can offer them.

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