Information-Driven Business: How to Manage Data and Information for Maximum Advantage

Looking to the Future

An organization that understands the value of its information, and manages the asset accordingly, is equipped to deploy new products and services quickly, with a substantially reduced risk. The entire business case can be summed up by equating information management with business agility.

The last decade has seen rapid improvement in the success rates of information management technology projects (such as data warehouses and document management repositories) as practitioners have refined their solutions. Management still, however, struggles to understand the important role that information plays in their business. The winners of the future are going to be those businesses that understand this role and are among the first in their market to leverage it to its maximum potential.

This book has focused on the techniques needed to know what information exists, where it is, and how to get to it. With so much focus on having the right information to make decisions, it is surprising that the handling of data is still regarded as a technical mystery by the majority of executives.

While many readers will have found some of the ideas in this book technical, they will be second-nature to the next generation of business leaders. In the near future, information will be consistently valued as an economic asset with data moving within and across enterprise boundaries with commensurate changes being recorded on the balance sheets. Before this can happen, however, both technology ...