Managing Information Resources For Business Success

By M. Isi Eromosele

Great business strategies can easily be sabotaged by poor execution. And even great business strategies with great execution can fall short, particularly if the information isn’t delivered in a way that facilitates intelligence.

No one would dispute the fact that data is important and management of data across its life-cycle, as well as refining data from collection to useful business intelligence, are critical to the business success of today’s intertwined global economy.

Businesses are in an increasing highly competitive global marketplace. To win in this environment, they must constantly adapt to changing market dynamics often influenced by local marketplace events and must place the change in the context of global market dynamics in order to meet overall profit and market penetration objectives. The forces at work driving this paradigm include:

Globalization

As markets saturate at the local level, pressure to expand market share and decrease costs is driving more companies to expand outside their traditional boundaries, often to other countries.

Because of this, decision making is becoming increasingly distributed across geographies, thereby spotlighting the criticality of delivering relevant information concurrently to widely diverse locations.

Technology Innovation

The accelerating pace of innovation, especially in communications and computing, is providing seamless data ubiquity and changing the basic rules of business.

The rise of miniaturization and integration is delivering wireless devices capable of serving a plethora of business and personal needs, ranging from computing to communications.

Wireless devices are becoming increasingly important in a decision-making process that increasingly occurs at the edge of the enterprise.

Business Convergence

We are living in an era of increasing convergence. This is the convergence of business relationships, technologies, geographies, and cultures.

It is this convergence that is driving the concurrent decentralization of decision making and forcing the migration of data and the corresponding intelligence it engenders from central repositories to diverse locations.

Companies are spending millions of dollars on executive time and consulting fees to

develop strategies to cope with these and other lesser factors, often with little success.

Why are these companies failing at executing their strategies? Strategy is formulated at the center, but executed at the edge.

Companies need to practice a dynamic and proactive strategy for the management of information across their life-cycles, rooted in business requirements, while optimizing the physical infrastructure to match the business value of the data.

A successful information life-cycle management strategy should be:

• Business-centric: by tying closely with key processes, applications, and initiatives of the business

• Policy-based: anchored in enterprise-wide information management policies that span all processes, applications, and resources

• Centrally managed: providing an integrated view into all information assets of the business, both structured and unstructured

• Heterogeneous: encompassing all types of data, platforms, and operating systems

• Aligned with the value of data: matching storage resources to the value of the data to the business at any given point in time.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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