Future Perfect?
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The technology and practice of information management – and the business case - have never been stronger than they are today.
‘Don’t know’ may be an acceptable response for a lifestyle questionnaire. But in a corporate setting, where decision-makers are awash with information, ignorance is no longer an option. Just ask Morgan Stanley. It’s ‘don’t know’ response cost the investment bank over $1 billion in a corporate lawsuit last year after a US judge decided its patchy retrieval of archived email amounted to obstruction.
When it comes to answering important business questions – what is our current sales pipeline? how satisfied are our customers with our services? – most managers still only have a partial picture.
Organisations are highly adept at providing access to and manipulating the structured data generated by enterprise applications. But the other 80% of corporate information that is held in emails, Word files and other unstructured forms, remains, at best, loosely accessible, the insights and knowledge that it holds shrouded in a mass of textual fog.
As this report shows, business leaders are still enticed by the vision of rapid, fully-informed decision making. There are, of course, still plenty of times where the opacity of information produces a ‘don’t know’ response. But the new technologies and practices of information management are doing a great deal to eliminate those.
