Add to favorites The world is drowning in zettabytes of data but you can stay afloat and avoid information chaos. CBR spoke to John Mancini, president of information management analysts AIIM, to find out how.
We are all aware of the sheer volume of information in modern life and in modern business. We live in an era when there has never been more information than there is currently and it is growing too – IDC forecasts we’ll produce 40 zettabytes by 2020.
We are also told of the value this information holds and its importance to business success, whileindustry analyst Gartner talks of us all ‘entering the era of the Digital Industrial Economy’. There is without doubt a major opportunity to make effective use of this information, yet despite this,many organisations are simply drowning in a sea of content and suffering from information chaos.
Dealing with this chaos will be the most significant challenge facing businesses over the next decade. What can organisations do to help make sense of the content and information their business generates, and turn information chaos into information opportunity?
What’s behind the information explosion?
Content and information is arriving at an ever increasing speed in an ever changing and growing array of formats. This potentially spells trouble for businesses. It has arisen from three major disruptors that have emerged at the same time to transform the business world as we know it.
These are:consumerisation, where business people assume enterprise solutions can be delivered as seamlessly and as simply as consumer-based solutions are delivered in their private lives; mobile and cloud, which have given way to an expectation of anywhere, anytime access andincrease the volume, variety, and velocity of information; and finally the changing nature of work, where organisations are forced to think flat and agile, not hierarchical and slow. This flattening of hierarchies is accelerated by consumerisation and cloud and mobile technologies.
Creating opportunity from the information chaos
While it may seem like many businesses are suffering from information chaos, it is possible to turn that chaos into opportunity. Check out the next page for the four key stages that should be considered by any business that wants to make the best use of its information.
