As all leaders recognise, information, along with your people, is your most important asset, so what are the benefits of effectively managing your organisation’s information? Simply put, information management done right can make you money, save you money and pursue regulatory compliance. I can’t think of any better reasons, but I hope to still make a compelling case.
First, let’s quickly examine the state of information. Recent forecasts estimate there will be nearly two zettabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of information by 2011, so there is a lot of it, and most of it does not neatly sit inside of a database. In fact, 95 percent of information is unstructured. That’s emails, files, videos – any type of content that is out in your environment today. What you will find is that most of the information in your organisation is unmanaged – nearly 85 percent – meaning there is no formal retention policy (how long do I keep this information) and no formal data protection policy (what do I keep and how do I store it) in place for managing that information.
The key takeaways are, there’s a lot of information, it’s not very well managed, and it’s becoming more and more regulated. As we’ve seen, the penalties for not properly managing information are getting more and more severe.
Regulatory compliance can be a moving target, with it more constantly added and changed. International regulations such as the UK’s Data Protection Act, the section of the Basel II accords that concern disclosure, and the EU’s Safe Harbor Privacy Guidelines that apply to digital information add more complexity to an already difficult regulatory environment. The more complexity, the more potential opportunities to be out of compliance there are.
Fortunately, technology that we and others deliver is available to help you take all of that information and put the right policies around it for a number of key attributes. One is choice, more flexibility about how you manage and where you place information (to save you money). Next is the ability to properly ensure compliance with regulations and enforce the policies that you want to have in place. By having policies around information, you will see greater efficiency. And finally, we know you want to extract more and more value from that information (to make you money) for competitive advantage, and that’s very critical today because again information is one of your most valuable assets.
We recently launched a set of products aimed at addressing requirements for policy-based information management (i.e. archiving, discovery, retention, deletion, etc). The ‘EMC SourceOne’ family enables companies to centrally manage multiple content types for consistent retention, disposition and overall lifecycle management, initially with email. This offering resonates because it sits at the intersection of hot button topics for executives around the world, namely, reduce costs; mitigate risk; pursue compliance and improve productivity.
Recent analyst projections show customers who implement an email management solution can reduce storage costs between 20-30 percent, improve time to complete backups by greater than 50 percent, and get an average payback in two to three years. All strong stuff, but we are seeing customers dramatically beat those numbers, with payback coming in under 12 months. Of course the size of your environment matters, but a 14,000 employee organisation of ours achieved payback in just seven months and 62 percent TCO savings.
Setting policies for managing information is clearly important, but the CEOs and CIOs with whom I meet with around the world also face the challenge of simply finding the information they know exists in their enterprise. Studies have shown that knowledge workers today spend almost a quarter of their time looking for information that they need to do their jobs. A recent study by the Economist found that 52 percent of executives spend “valuable time” searching for critical information. The same study cited another equally revealing statistic that nearly two-thirds of executives say that rapid decision-making is a defining attribute of an agile business. But it’s hard to make decisions without the right information. So search and analytics technologies need to be part of your information management strategy.
Another resounding theme from executives is, they need to collaborate and share information better and faster than ever before. I think we all recognise the value that can come from collaboration, namely innovation, better customer service, and faster decision-making. While the collaboration of yesterday focused on document-centric activities, the new face of collaboration is community-based, bidirectional, and conversational, with extended boundaries that include partners, suppliers, research institutions, and customers regardless of location. In this Web 2.0, community-based collaboration, people find each other and share ideas, experiences, and perspectives. This conversation-centric collaboration lays the groundwork for accelerated innovation.
An “information infrastructure” strategy has good governance at its core and must securely enforce compliance across all types of content, applications, platforms and Web 2.0 technologies. The strategy must also protect sensitive information wherever it resides—within or beyond the firewall. I believe effective information management enables enterprises to:
– Manage information growth—not be overwhelmed by it;
– Secure information to protect intellectual property and meet regulatory mandates;
– Employ information to drive innovation around customer needs;
– Extend access to information to streamline the collaborative process.
It’ll also help you make money, save money, and pursue compliance. It’s never too late to get started and you can expand your strategy over time.
To learn more about the EMC vision for information management, please visit us online at http://www.emc.com