Overcoming the barriers to enterprise information management

Locating and accessing information required to run the business when it is spread across multiple systems has long been recognised as a problem.

It's something that has been coming through in Freeform Dynamics surveys for years, and a recent study based on the interviews of 123 senior finance and operations managers across Western Europe was no exception (see figure 1).

While this kind of picture never comes as a surprise, it does beg the question of why things don't seem to be getting any better, especially when other research highlights the importance of information access to business productivity (see figure 2, on next page).

Lack of progress is not because of a shortage of technology. Today, for example, solutions to help aggregate, consolidate, and federate data are now sufficiently mature for mainstream usage, as are technologies that enable distributed search and the creation and management virtual storage pools.

The reality is that in most organisations the majority of the information management challenges are rooted in matters of policy and ownership.

Ownership issue
One of the fundamental factors here is history. The tendency has been for each department or function across the business to manage its own information, isolated from everyone else's.

The result is considerable volumes of data held in separate systems that often store the same, similar or related information in different ways and are not easy to get working together.

More significant than the physical fragmentation and disjoints, however, is the local ownership mentality that often accompanies the silo approach. The psychology of it's-my-system-and-my-data is reflected in a parochial approach to budgeting and funding.

We then too often see either political resistance or general apathy on the part of local business managers when it comes to higher level improvement programmes that look to pull things together across organisational boundaries.

It's for these kinds of reasons that CIOs cannot fix the perennial problems of information access unilaterally. With a view across the business and its information assets, however, they are in a unique position to educate, encourage and facilitate progress.

Figure 1

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