Realizing the benefits of information management
Today there is pressure on organizations to cut costs, by maybe 10-20% over the next year or two. The question is: where are those savings going to come from? Answer: through implementing a common and controlled information management environment.
The fact is, in the information age, most large organizations spend an inordinate amount of time creating, reading, manipulating, storing and sharing documents and other data. They are knowledge-based or, to be more accurate, information-based.
You would think, therefore, that they would regard information as their most important asset. Wrong. Instead the focus is on other resources, such as people or equipment, information technology and possibly individual items of information.
People are often left to their own devices, teams don’t collaborate effectively and information is simply not managed on an enterprise-wide basis.
This is a serious failure of management. What needs to happen is that an organization must be re-engineered around its information, which needs to be understood, categorized, standarized, structured – and above all, controlled. Only then can an enterprise fully realize both cost and efficiency benefits.
No organization should embark on an information management project unless it can realize significant benefits. The questions are: what benefits can be achieved, what will be the value of these benefits and how can they be achieved?
Whilst benefits realization is key, actually identifying and measuring the benefits of information management initiatives can be difficult.
In the work that we do with clients we regularly find as many as 25 distinct benefits to support business cases for information management projects, and we have a checklist of over 50. Every benefit is measurable and almost all are expressed in monetary terms – the value that the project will deliver to the organization.
The discipline of benefits realization ensures that projects and programmes deliver what they promise: it provides focus, demonstrates value-for-money, reduces the risk of failure and maximizes the benefits eventually achieved.
Find out more about benefits realization >
Downloads
Download our exclusive White Paper, ‘Realize the benefits of information management’
This download is available exclusively to Bramble.cc members – login or register above for free access to our exclusive members’-only area!