The Time Is Running Out! Why Information Excellence is Critical for Businesses

Information excellence?is the ability of an organization to use information optimally to achieve its competitive advantage. Particularly with digital solutions and platforms, the volume of organizational content grows exponentially. Add the increasing population of people connected to the internet using various mobile devices, and you have tremendous amounts of data available through the increased use of such devices.

Therefore, the availability of high-quality information is increasingly crucial for the quality of critical business processes because it enables people within the processes to make the right decisions and perform appropriate actions.

What does this mean to businesses?

The amount of data employees needs to perform business processes and make the right decisions increases daily. Information is often decentralized across the enterprise for most companies, leading to time wasted looking for information and increased error rates from using the wrong information.?

Throw in the Great Resignation, and firms could face a 2-part problem; dealing with increasing data silos and the need for knowledge transfer between employees within the enterprise.

Companies can plan for the imminent future by adopting these five practices.

Establish information governance: this is an accountability framework that defines the expected behaviour in the creation, modification, use, archiving, deletion and storage of information. It contains the standards and metrics, roles and guidelines, and the processes required to ensure effective and efficient information use for organizations to achieve their goals.

Information governance procedures help manage the use of information records, such as customer information, employee records, business records and intellectual property. As a business, you must identify professionals who will work with leadership and other stakeholders to create policies that specify how your employees should handle all corporate information assets.

Design information architecture defines how content will be structured and presented to employees when interacting with the information system. The goal is to help employees find information and complete tasks quickly. Firms need to understand how the various parts of their business fit together to create information flows between these on the system.

To be successful, firms must ensure their information architecture has four main components; organization - how to categorize and structure information, labelling - how to present information, navigation - how employees browse through information and searching - how employees look for information.

Integrate to process management: ensure focus is on optimizing processes that have the most significant positive impact on organizational value creation. Firms need to understand the current state by documenting process workflows and interdependencies and highlighting pain points and desires for the future that are related to information access.

The next step is to develop and implement more effective processes by introducing improved access to information assets following stakeholder pains and desires. This way, firms can ensure that their information assets are up-to-date and relevant at all times.

Map system architecture describes the information system's structure, behaviour, and views. The goal is to understand what employees and the organization need from the information systems and whether current technologies can support these requirements.

Determine if the current infrastructure can support the information excellence vision. Assess the current feature capabilities and identify system redundancies for consolidations. Several vendors provide content management solutions, but firms must develop precise and comprehensive requirements to evaluate vendors systematically.

Sustain the capability: management studies suggest that developing and sustaining capabilities is essential in achieving competitive advantage. Firms can support their transformation by creating new organizational roles and functions to provide information excellence governance across the enterprise.

Start with assembling the team and define the responsibilities and processes to deliver the governance functions. Assure commitment by defining expectations, rewards and consequences for each stakeholder role.

For firms looking to raise their game to stand out and thrive in today's fast-paced and global competitive landscape, a solid foundation of information excellence is required.

Businesses need to consolidate data in silos, optimize decision systems, manage corporate risk using existing technology investments or invest in new business transformation technologies.