Summary

The technology options available to organizations seeking to deploy information management continue to increase. At the same time, managers are finding they must respond to increases in data volumes and the numbers of sources and types that they use to meet business demands. Our recent research on information management reveals a significant increase in needs that will be served best by enterprise-wide information architecture investments. A total of 747 qualified respondents completed our survey on the topic. Most are located in the United States, but they represent all major industries and company sizes ranging from less than US$100 million in annual revenue to more than US$10 billion. The research report concludes that master data management (MDM) and related technologies for customer data integration (CDI), product information management (PIM), data quality, data integration and information security are priorities for the next wave of technology adoption. To address these interlocking needs, Ventana Research recommends that organizations establish a blueprint for information management that will guide them in making technology choices that will deliver business value.

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Savvy organizations understand that consistently making better business decisions directly impacts their top and bottom lines. They therefore are looking into new tools and applications that can help them improve access to and integration and management of the information that informs those decisions. There are various ways of meeting those needs. For example, Internet search engines such as the immensely popular Google and Yahoo have become standard interfaces for hundreds of millions of people, making clear that it is worthwhile for businesses to explore adding enterprise search to their information management strategy. For organizations where a mix of incompatible systems makes it difficult to gain direct access to data and content rapidly enough, technologies such as enterprise information integration (EII) can access data directly using the SQL and XML standards.

Our research (sponsored by Business Objects and IBM and media sponsors AIIMexpo, BusinessIntelligence.com, Intelligent Enterprise, IT Business Edge, Source Media DM and BI Review, Technology Evaluation Center and TechTarget SearchDataManagement.com) identifies business intelligence (BI) as a crucial component of many organizations’ information management strategy. Although many people think of it solely as an analytic technology, BI also can play an important information management role as the front end to data warehouses, data marts and content management systems as well as an array of legacy systems. Therefore, integrating BI more tightly into both the organization’s information architecture and its information management strategy can pay dividends. Of course, integrating all of this requires data and information integration as well as master data and metadata management and enterprise search. Ensuring your BI investment can bind to the information architecture requires understanding the intersection points. Remember, however, that business intelligence is not a replacement for information management, but rather a consumer of it.

Our research reveals that more advanced elements of information management techniques –for example, semantic data access, text mining, search and MDM – have not been widely implemented yet, although some organizations plan to do so within the next 12 months; enterprise-level MDM is at the top of these respondents’ deployment list, though only at 16 percent of the response pool. We also note the growing importance of information security, which, at 33 percent, was among the top four categories of projects under way. Interest in CDI and PIM, which are subsets of MDM, is increasing. Nearly one-third (32 percent) of organizations have CDI projects under way or planned for deployment in the next 12 months, and one-fourth (25 percent) said the same regarding PIM projects.

Our research found that the list of functional business areas that currently have information management initiatives in process or that will begin them within the next 12 months matched the business functions for which information management is most important. Organizations identified data warehousing and BI as important initiatives, which typically is how many organizations have portrayed information management in their organizations. That only 11 percent of the respondents said their companies will launch a data warehouse project in the next year reflects the prevalence of existing projects and, we conclude, also a change in focus by IT in information management. Data quality, data integration and data governance all ranked high as new initiatives under way and new projects are planned in enterprise search and text mining that also will widen the scope of information management.

Assessment

Our research reveals that companies are willing and able to implement new information management systems and technologies to fulfill users’ changing needs. Most customers said that they would prefer to have a single vendor supply a complete range of technologies for information management, but this is simply not practical. We advise business executives considering initiatives in this area to examine the existing portfolio of information management components and decide whether current suppliers are likely to meet all anticipated future needs, then do cost/benefit analyses to compare what they offer to other suppliers’ lineups. Make sure, at the same time that any new products introduced will work with existing tools. Ventana Research recommends seeking from any vendor you consider and contacting current customer references; insist that vendors put you in contact with customers whose business resembles yours and who are innovating with information management in ways that may benefit you.

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