Information, Information Everywhere, Not a drop to Think!
As a small business matures to become an organization, the 'information' it houses, becomes of interest to numerous parties within and outside that organization. This information becomes one of the key factors for that business to sustain and measure growth and establish partnerships. This blog entry will provide an introduction to the IT practice of managing this information – Enterprise Information Management (EIM) and discuss how it can be used during different stages of the information lifecycle.
I will talk about the following six stages of the Information lifecycle:
- Information Collection
- Information Sharing
- Information Access Control - AAA
- User Empowerment & Governance
- Information Search
- Information Intelligence
Figure 1 - Information Lifecycle
In general, organizations start looking for an EIM solution after they have accumulated some information which needs to be managed. This information could come from sources such as corporate policies, investor communications, corporate events, etc. For businesses that grow organically during the first few years, this information is usually managed in flat systems like local file storage or documents circulated in emails. After an organization reaches critical mass in terms of people interested in the information, volume of the information and the money needed for managing this information, it starts looking for a system or set of systems to manage this information – enter EIM!
Information Collection
The EIM tools and technologies that can be employed to collect information from this point on is an Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) supported by a Content Management System (CMS) and Web Analytics Solution. The portal technology can be deployed in two modes depending on the nature of the intended audience – an intranet/ internal portal or an external facing portal for customers, partners and the world at large.
More adventurous businesses can also top-up their vanilla portal offering with web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, social commerce tools, etc to encourage users to create information. Even more mature businesses can use blogs as a means of rationalizing and collecting requirements for public facing portals. The EIP technology can be used as one of the means for gathering information.
For a more controlled and formal means of producing information, CMS systems can be used in conjunction with the portal systems. People responsible for publishing information to external or internal audiences can do it through a CMS system. This information can then be deployed on to the portal without any major IT involvement. Besides providing publishing capabilities, a CMS system can provide a plethora of other related services like approval workflows, content auditing and archival capabilities, content preview, authorization, version control, etc.
Information pertaining to a user’s online journey on a public facing portal can be collected with the help of a web analytics solution. It can provide insights pertaining to user demographics, user behavior on different sections of the online system and sources of online traffic generation. This information can be used by the systems dealing with Information Intelligence to produce actionable information.
Information Sharing
Once the information is collected, it needs to be disbursed to the interested parties. EIP systems can be employed for this purpose too. Organizations can use their intranet or internet based portal to share information with people inside and outside the organization. The intranet portal can be used to share information such as HR policies, company news, and corporate directory, etc. While its internet counterpart can be used to share information pertaining to investor relations, nature of business of the company, contact points, etc. Businesses that transact online will have much more comprehensive internet portals containing product catalogues, product pricing and availability, payment services, etc.
Information Access Control - Authentication, Authorization and Audit
As the volume of the information grows, it can become increasingly difficult to ensure that the right people have access to the right information and only to the information that they are authorized for. For a medium sized enterprise, a typical user may have access to information housed in fifteen to fifty systems. When any such employee leaves an organization, it can get extremely difficult to track and remove his access from all of the systems unless the access is centrally controlled. That’s where the Identity and Access Management (IdAM or IAM) Systems from the EIM practice can come in handy.
Someone once said - organizations need IAM systems for the same reasons as cars need brakes – not to slow them down but to give them the confidence that when you really have to stop, it would not be much of a trouble. Effectively deployed IAM solutions can provide centralized authentication, access control, single sign on capabilities, auditing and user management capabilities for an organization.
User Empowerment & Governance
The only way that a large enterprise can generate information at steady pace and keep the interested parties updated is through automation and e-enablement of the people responsible for information generation. An enterprise CMS solution can provide a level of freedom for content authors who can use it for publishing content to the corporate internet and intranet portals. At the same time, it can be used to build a level of governance to ensure that there is control on what gets published where and also to enforce accountability. This can be done using features like approval workflows, versioning and access control.
Information Search
One problem that every organization – big or small, faces in the information domain is search-ability of the information. With hundreds of people and systems churning out information on different channels, it can get quite overwhelming to search for the right information both for internal and external users of the company. EIM’s Enterprise Search solution is a good first step which can be used to solve this problem. The reason why I said it’s a first step is because it takes a lot more to pull up effective search results in addition to deploying a top brand search solution. A few key ones include:
- The systems generating information need to ensure that they provide the right information in form of content and meta-data to the search solution.
- The users generating this information need to know how to make information searchable by providing the correct meta-data.
- The business needs to provide the correct classification for all the information elements or nodes in the form of taxonomy.
A mature EIM services provider can help businesses deploy effective search solution which can be used to deliver a lot more than traditional keyword searches.
Information Intelligence
While most organizations start with the use of EIM technologies for information management, quite a few of them start mining the collected information for insights which can help them improve their business. The EIM practice which deals with this aspect of information management is called Business Intelligence and Enterprise Data Warehouse. The transactional data from different systems is sourced into an enterprise data warehouse atop which, a business intelligence solution is deployed.
The BI solution can provide interesting insights into what customers are doing on different systems within the business. The inferences drawn from this system can be used to execute targeted marketing campaigns, recommend products to customers and running what-if scenarios. More evolved enterprises can use a combination of Intelligence and Search solution for managing customer’s online experience to generate more sales.
And that’s a wrap!
The EIM solution package provides technology and services to manage each stage of the information lifecycle. The following figure provides the mapping of the Information management lifecycle with EIM tools and technologies:
Figure 2 - Information Lifecycle with EIM Technology Mapping
In absence of an EIM solution, an organization would land up in a situation where there is information all around, perhaps in duplicate or triplicate, without having any information to infer and make decisions on. To extend the thought from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, an organization without an EIM solution would have Information, Information Everywhere, not a drop to Think!
