Information Agenda Complex

The Information Agenda: Rapidly Leveraging Information as a Trusted Strategic Asset for Competitive Advantage

The need for an Information Agenda
As the CIO of a flourishing business, you are happy to report that the current information projects are going well. The new call center is up and running, the new data warehouse is on-line, and the new customer loyalty systems have beendeployed successfully.

Things seem to be going well until the CEO asks, “Who are our most profitable customers and which channels do they prefer?” Although the new systems have a lot of information, they can’t immediately produce the requested information. The information the CEO needs will take time and effort to extract and may delay other projects. The successful information projects haven’tcreated the ability to rapidly respond to this question and the CEO will want more answers to address new and emerging business opportunities. You realize that you need a more unified approach to leverage the information you already have. You need to create an Information Agenda for your organization.

What is an Information Agenda?
An Information Agenda is an approach for transforminginformation into a trusted strategic asset that can be rapidly leveraged across applications, processes and decisions for sustained competitive advantage

The evolution of the Information Agenda
Over the years, businesses have focused on reducing processing time and costs by investing in applications that helped automate and streamline processes. Frequently, business units made localized decisionsthat were convenient, but ended up creating multiple applications with little consistency. This often meant that cross organizational decisions couldn’t be implemented with speed. Over the last two decades businesses and technology vendors have worked together to create an application agenda to alleviate some of these bottlenecks. Typically an organization’s application agenda consists of astandardized application platform to rapidly build custom applications for competitive differentiation, and a set of packaged applications for the rest.

Information Management is at the same inflection point that applications were about twenty years ago. A multitude of local information projects like data warehouses, data marts, business intelligence and master data management have been createdwith little information consistency. New requests for information can not be delivered with speed and flexibility. Businesses need to treat information as a trusted strategic asset. They need to create an Information Agenda for their organizations to achieve the information agility that allows for sustained competitive advantage. Sometimes people make a false assumption that having multitudes ofinformation projects means they have an Information Agenda. An Information Agenda requires a broader view of information that treats it as an asset that can be reused across the enterprise.

Transforming to an Information Based Enterprise
An Information Based Enterprise is an organization that has an Information Agenda. It has the flexibility to rapidly deliver information as needed to optimizedecisions, applications and business decisions for sustained competitive advantage. The transformation to an Information Based Enterprise doesn’t require the replacement of the existing systems and information sources. It only requires that those systems rapidly expose insightful information in a flexible way.

Making this transformation can seem like a daunting task and it is often difficult toknow where to start. You can get started with an existing information project by leveraging the tools and methodology from IBM to convert information into a trusted strategic asset which can be used beyond the scope of your current project. This is fairly straightforward because it provides business value at each step of the process. IBM has the experience it takes to guide your transformation...