5 steps to improve your business’s information management

The cost of not managing information

It sounds like an ideal, frictionless system, but the reality is far different. According to IDC, the average worker can find the information they need only 56 percent of the time.¹ They spend nearly 36 percent of their time just looking for it.

It gets worse. A PwC study found that 96 percent of businesses fail to unlock the full potential of their information.² More than 40 percent of the businesses in the study said they obtained little tangible benefit from their information, and 23 percent said they got nothing out of it at all.

Clearly, the Information Age hasn’t lived up to its promise for many organizations. Which is a shame, because if you manage your information well, it can transform your organization into an agile, quick-thinking machine that develops the products tomorrow’s customers want and gets them to market faster than competitors.

But to do that, you must first unlock the information—get it out of silos and create a robust system to manage it. Once you’ve done that, it can serve as a beacon to identify everything from supply bottlenecks to gaps in customer service.

How to manage information in an organization

Many organizations don’t know where to start to unlock their information. Here’s a general road map:

1. Set up an enterprise-wide information management system with a high-level executive in charge (think Chief Data Officer). Gartner recommends that you also appoint a lead information steward for every business unit to help create risk controls for the information they use.³

2. Conduct an audit of your company’s information to find out where the costs and bottlenecks are coming from. Legacy systems and paper documents are often culprits. Converting these into digital ones allows them to be accessible and searchable by anyone, anywhere. This not only saves money and helps your employees be more productive—it can lead to new business insights. And where this might have once seemed like a monumental task, today’s capture and conversion services available on an as-a-service platform like the Intelligent Business Platform (IBP)℠ can make document digitization and data capture simpler and more accessible for all businesses.

3. Eliminate unnecessary storage space. Physical and digital storage cost you money. Are you using the most optimal combination of on-site and off-premises solutions, or is it time to make changes? This shouldn’t be a one-time exercise—technology advances quickly, and you should review your systems regularly to see if a new arrangement might work better.

4. Use an enterprise content management or data management system to shed light on the 80 to 90 percent of your data that is unstructured. That includes Word and Google documents, emails, PDFs, PowerPoints, videos, audio files, images, and even social media posts on Facebook and Twitter. Conventional spreadsheets won’t aggregate and analyze this kind of information—instead, you would need to employ a business intelligence data mining solution.

5. Apply big data analytics to your company’s information to spot trends and make predictions. With the enormous volumes of information available to be analyzed, it’s important to ask the right questions and focus on areas where you can save on costs or develop new revenue streams. Are you having delivery problems? Analyze the supply chain. Want to know what your customers really think of you? Don’t just rely on surveys—analyze data from your social media channels. Are customers longing for something you don’t provide? Maybe it’s time to launch a new product line.

Once you unleash the power of your information, there’s no going back.

With more improved efficiency and insights gained by optimizing your information and unlocking its full value, you’ll wonder why you didn’t start sooner.