Managing information is similar to managing other corporate resources - people, money, buildings and equipment - and doing it well directly supports the achievement of your business goals. On the other hand, failing to manage your information leads to major problems: inaccessibility of vital data; waste of staff time searching for mislaid files and documents; poor decision making based on inadequate, outdated or absent information; and lowered morale for staff trying to deal with too much useless data. Imagining that such problems can be resolved simply by changing your hardware or software is rather like thinking that moving to a new bank will solve your money problems.

What is information management?

In short, it aims to get the best value from all the different types of information generated or used within an organisation. That information may be from internal or external sources, structures (like a form) or unstructured (like a letter), it may be published or not, useful for five minutes or five years, its format may be paper or electronic and its significance purely local and administrative or enterprise-wide and strategic. The practice of information management addresses all these issues and more, allowing you to more effectively to exploit corporate information, in whatever form it exists, in order to meet business needs and objectives.

How will you benefit from effective information management?

First of all you can avoid the many inefficient ways of using information, which all waste money:

information which is collected but not needed
information stored long term after it is needed
useful information which is inaccessible to potential users
information disseminated more widely than necessary
collection of the same basic data by more than one group of people
duplicated storage of the same basic data
inefficient methods used to collect, analyse, store and retrieve information
vital information which is not identified or not collected

By recognising these problems and taking the appropriate action to correct them, you will not only reduce your information handling costs - significant in themselves - but will also add considerable value to all the business activities, via:

improved quality of information for policy-makers and planners
more effective discharge of operational functions, higher quality of service provided and improved customer relationships
more accurate and more cost-effectively produced management information
reduced expenditure on the collection, communication and storage of unnecessary data
better focussed IT investment