The amount of information that enterprises create and store is growing at an alarming rate. In order to derive business value from this data and gain competitive advantage, decision makers must aggressively manage enterprise information and develop processes for information governance.

We've Created a Monster...

After decades of generating and storing information for business purposes, many enterprises are finding themselves unable to maintain, retrieve, or leverage data in any useful manner. While management of structured corporate databases is adequate at best, the real problem lies in controlling the vast amounts of unstructured data being created, such as office documents and e-mail.

Conversely, information governance aimed at corralling this glut of new data is not being adopted nearly fast enough. Given the current trajectory, managers will quickly find themselves drowning in data that they are no longer able to use or gain value from. Enterprises that have adopted information governance have seen marked improvements in their ability to lower costs, improve business processes, and boost profitability; however, there is still a long way to go. Consider the following:

Currently, the enterprise's ability to process, analyze, and use corporate information is being outstripped by its ability to create and store it. Overall, Info-Tech estimates that the amount of enterprise information is growing at a compound annual growth rate of between 50% and 100%. CIO Insight's May 2006 Information Management Survey suggests that only about a third of enterprises currently exercise effective information governance.

• In a recent 2006 report, the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) claims that the total worldwide archive capacity for digital information is 2,786 petabytes. This is expected to grow to over 27,000 petabytes by 2010. The bulk of this capacity will be used for unstructured data. According to ESG, e-mail archives alone will increase by 700% during this period.

• According to a 2002 study conducted by the University of California at Berkeley, 93% of all newly created information is digital. The study also found that the amount of new stored information doubled between 1999 and 2002.

...and the Beast Must Be Fed

• ESG released a report in 2002 that studied the growth of "Reference Information." This includes "digital assets retained for active reference and value," such as electronic documents and contracts, compliance records, digitized checks, blueprints, historical documents, medical images, bioinformatics, video, photographs, and voice data. According to ESG's assessment, reference information is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 92%, compared to 61% for traditional data such as database and transactional information.

• ESG also offers the following findings from a 2003 study on information management:
• • The worldwide storage capacity of records kept for compliance purposes will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 64%.
  • The largest financial institutions experience annual increases in data storage capacity of 100% to 200%.
  • In the life sciences industry, the volume of biological data is doubling every six months.
  • U.S. Medicaid and Medicare expect a 50% increase in claims information due to an aging generation of Baby Boomers.

Taming the Beast

It is obvious that a renewed vigilance towards information management is required. "Making better use of information" was cited as among the top five CIO priorities in CIO Insight's April 2006 CIO Role Survey(36% of respondents). The only imperatives that ranked higher were improving business processes for agility (48%) and aligning IT with the needs of the business (53%).

The following results of the more recent CIO Insight May 2006 Information Management Survey demonstrate that many enterprises still have a long way to go:

• Among those enterprises that had implemented information governance (52% of all respondents), less than two-thirds of these (59%) said that they were highly effective at processing, understanding, and using the information they collect for business advantage. This means that on average, only about one-third of all enterprises practice effective information governance.
   
• An effective information governance process should include the following aspects:
• • Alignment of information requirements with IT/business.
  • Information security and privacy.
  • Information quality.
  • Access and usage rights.
  • Information architecture and structure.
  • Information storage and deletion.

• Regulatory compliance is a key driver of better information governance. Although this issue was not widely explored in the CIO Insight study, it is clear that many of the enterprises that employ information governance do so to comply with regulations such as HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and Sarbanes-Oxley.

Bottom Line

Despite massive investments in information gathering, most enterprises are not realizing full value from their information assets. In order to improve business processes and boost productivity and profitability, CIOs must establish an information management strategy now. The rapid rate at which enterprise information is growing means the longer they wait, the more challenging - and costly - the task will be.

Data Definitions

Structured data: Information that can be represented according to specific descriptive parameters, such as rows and columns in a relational database.

Unstructured data: Information that cannot be used as a data source in a clean and consistent fashion. This includes office documents, e-mail, instant messages, Web pages, image files, audio, and video.

How Big Is a Petabyte?  One petabyte is equal to 1,000 terabytes.

• In order to print one petabyte worth of information, you would need 50 million trees worth of paper.
• Two petabytes is the digital equivalent of all the academic research libraries in the U.S.
• All printed material in existence as of 2002 would consume 200 petabytes worth of disc space.
• The size of the entire Internet in 2002 was approximately 530 petabytes (including the deep Web).

Note: Numbers may vary depending on data compression techniques.