Information is the lifeblood of every business, second only to staff in importance. However, for years organisations have built Byzantine information management systems that pay little heed to how enterprises need to consume that information. As the volume of data being generated has escalated, the problems inherent in this systems-dominated approach to information have become pressing. Executives often spend much more time compiling the information they think they need to support a decision than they do on actually weighing up their options and their possible ramifications.

Today, some organisations are starting to appreciate the benefits of moving the responsibility of information management away from IT and into the business, where its ownership lies, and where the real value of the derived information and knowledge can be fully exploited.

In this model of information management, IT replaces its data stewardship role with that of facilitator, providing the tools to channel the flow of information throughout the enterprise.

At global recruitment consultancy Hudson the ability to easily locate the ideal job candidate provides competitive advantage. On any given day it has three million candidate records in Europe that it may need to scour to unearth the right person for their clients. Hudson had historically relied on a database of candidates that consultants could query, says chief operating officer Laurent Chen. But with the volume of searches approaching 12,000 a day, “using the master database actually slowed down our consultants’ access to key information and hindered productivity,” he says.

By introducing a search appliance from Google, Hudson’s consultants can now search for candidates with particular skills, or similar positions that a candidate might fit, in a flash, says Chen.

Historically, business leaders may have assumed that databases, business intelligence systems and perhaps a few data quality tools would provide suffici ent analytical powers to understand what was going on in the business. Today, however, the burgeoning importance of unstructured data is redefining the toolset required to make sense of enterprise information. Recent research by Coleman Parkes for HP suggested that UK business leaders believe that only 25 per cent of their data is currently unstructured. However, that is at odds with most industry predictions, highlighting a dangerous blindspot in corporate information management plans.

Unstructured data includes emails, documents, and files from third parties that lie outside of internal systems. Ignoring, or underestimating, the amount of unstructured data in a company means that organisations are failing to fully understand their business information and its importance.

“All of our data is unstructured,” says Hudson’s Chen. “However, we have created specific mechanisms to automatically put some structure around the information so that every piece of data we produce will be in the right place and can be found.”

Such approaches are consistent with the information management frameworks constructed by analysts. Gartner defines enterprise information management as an integrated discipline for structuring, describing and governing information assets, regardless of organisational and technological boundaries, in order to improve operational efficiency, promote transparency and enable business insight.

Elsewhere, Ovum also has a framework for unified information management (UIM), but as practice leader Ian Charlesworth explains, the benefits of these frameworks are not necessarily achieved by rigid adherence to the vision, but from the aspiration to impose some order on information management practices.

“The real problem facing organisations is how to join the dots between the vision, the vendor offerings and the user’s demands,” says Charlesworth. “UIM offers the disciplines, organisation and structure that are needed to tie this moving feast together so that when companies are analysing the benefits of a smaller piece of information management technology they can assess it against the concept of a larger framework, to see whether it really fits.”

For many, those frameworks will be founded on tried and tested technologies, such as business intelligence, content management and enterprise search. But the gloomy economy is adding impetus to the need for effective information management, as business leaders strive to make better use of the data they collect, and to reduce the costs associated with that.