“Information Management is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to IM.”
What Douglas Adams would have said if he was in my position.
My role includes the words Information Manager in the title and that’s where the confusion begins. Only 1 person in 100 knows what it means. A further 10 in 100 think that they know what it means – but when pressed for an explanation you will get at least 11 different interpretations.
It’s hardly surprising that the wider business community is unsure about what IM is. So just to set the record straight, here’s what I believe IM is:
- Data quality – to create high quality information.
- Metadata management – to clearly define all elements.
- Data integration – to bring the data together for all management processes to use.
- Analytics – processes data to reveal hidden meaning.
- Business Intelligence – delivers insight to the people and processes making decisions.
- Performance Management – uses consistent and uniform measures of core entities (departments, staff, customers, products, accounts, etc.) to optimise operations.
