“Creating Winning Strategies for Information Advantage”

EMC Corporation released the first report from the Council for Information Advantage, a group of nine respected IT executives committed to innovating best practices and sharing expert guidance on how to transform information into business value, and brought together by EMC.

Titled Creating Winning Strategies for Information Advantage, the report explores how organizations today can overcome the challenges of transforming their content and data into useful information and actionable insight. As the competitive landscape has intensified from converging product categories and globalizing markets, the need to make more productive use of corporate information has now become more important than ever. Based on the collective best practices of these leading IT experts, the report provides a blueprint for managing information as a corporate asset – similar to the way organizations strategically manage labor and capital – in order to evolve information into the quality of business insight that results in competitive gains.

"When an organization leverages information to revolutionize how it competes and transforms how it does business, it has gained an information advantage," said Mark Lewis, President of Content Management and Archiving Division at EMC. "Throughout my countless customer visits, we have found that organizations are still really struggling with how to make intelligent use of the information they have. EMC convened the Council for Information Advantage because its members have deployed strategies for leveraging information to compete more efficiently, increase customer loyalty, grow market share and identify new sources of business value. We believe that their personal experiences and lessons learned will help other organizations blaze their own trails toward an information-advantaged future."

The first report from the Council for Information Advantage outlines fundamental strategies that are often overlooked as companies work to achieve information-driven competitive advantage. Council members drew from their wealth of professional experiences to provide actionable recommendations that can be executed, for the most part, without costly investments in new IT solutions or programs. This practical, straightforward guidance focuses on how to increase the accessibility and value of corporate information and win organizational support for information-based change initiatives.

These guiding strategies
which are explored in detail within the report are:

• Transform information liabilities into business assets through information governance.  Define and institute an enterprise-wide information governance policy to control how information is kept, shared and used. Consider appointing a Chief Information Architect who is responsible for maximizing the value and reusability of information by taking a long-term view of technology development.
• Elevate information architecture. Rather than fine-tuning data for specific applications or narrow business processes, align data and technology solutions in order to maximize the potential value of information through access and reuse.
• Balance people and process with technology. Increase the time and resources devoted to managing changes in how people work as a result of new technology investments.

"It’s a major advantage to have a culture that values information because it removes a lot of the barriers to creating knowledge," commented Council member Deirdre Woods in the report. "That’s one of the advantages universities have. The sharing of information and knowledge is inherently understood to be a good thing and a priority because it’s part of our core mission."

The members of the Council for Information Advantage include:

• Dave Blue, Senior Manager, Enterprise Data Services, The Boeing Company
• Andrew Brown, Managing Director, Head of Strategy Architecture and Optimization, Bank of America
• Guy Chiarello, Chief Information Officer, JPMorgan Chase
• John Chickering, Vice President, Fidelity Investments
• Paul Cushing, Senior Vice President of Technology and Media Infrastructure, ESPN
• Dimitris Mavroyiannis, Group Chief Information Officer, Eurobank EFG Group
• Sanjay Mirchandani, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, EMC Corporation
• Joe Solimando, Senior Vice President of Global Operations and Technology, Chief Information Officer, Disney Consumer Products
• Deirdre Woods, Associate Dean and Chief Information Officer, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Facts: Too Much Data, Not Enough Information

• An IDC research study commissioned by EMC estimate the amount of data in the digital structure is doubling every 18 months. By 2011, the total amount of information created is forecasted to 1.8 million zetabytes which is roughly 129 million times greater than the information contained in all the books catalogued in the U.S. Library of Congress.
• EMC estimates that 85 percent of all unstructured information within an organization goes unmanaged – there are no formal policies for retaining, protecting or handling it.
• In a recent research study conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, only 38 percent of the respondents said their companies had a formal enterprise-wide information governance strategy in place. Sixty-eight percent of the respondents expect their information governance challenges to become more complex over the next three years.
• Last year, a survey conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value discovered that eight out of 10 business leaders make major decisions with missing or untrusted information. In many cases, the information needed probably resides within the organization; just not accessible at the right time.