Information is exploding. It is growing at such a rapid rate that it has become difficult to harness effectively to gain smarter business outcomes. An Information Agenda and Enterprise Content Management can help organisations effectively address information management and allow businesses to leverage the power of information as a trategic asset.

The starting point to addressing the challenges of information management is the ability to manage data over its lifecycle. This involves handling all structured data within databases with a robust, scalable and flexible infrastructure. This will keep structured data safe, secure and accessible and retain it for as long as necessary.

The next step is to optimise content, process and compliance management to provide a streamlined solution for managing all unstructured content. One of the biggest information challenges facing business currently is that more than 80% of data being generated today is unstructured content in the form of paper documents, faxes, emails, audio and video files. In order to manage this effectively, it is necessary to have an integrated solution to manage unstructured content in the context of business processes, and be able to leverage it.

As the foundation for structured and unstructured data is built, it is necessary to integrate this data from multiple repositories; including applications, databases and file systems; to build a single view of key business entities such as products, customers and suppliers. The third stage involves creating a trusted source of information within an organisation.

Finally, optimising business performance allows organisations to gain meaningful insights from this information so that critical decisions that drive smarter outcomes can be made. This puts planning capabilities,
measuring and monitoring, and reporting and analysis capabilities into the hands of the business users throughout an organisation, so that the answers to the questions that drive performance can be found.

Throughout the deployment of technologies and services to manage structured and unstructured content, build trusted information and optimise business performance; Information Agenda provides a proven industry-based based
approach and assets to build the strategy and roadmap.

Organisations are beginning to realise that key competitive advantages are contained within business processes. And to optimise these processes and get the most out of the masses of information within an organisation, it is necessary to harness tools such as Information Agenda and ECM.

Together, ECM and Information Agenda provide an entry point to realising the vision of Information on Demand - information when it is needed, where it is needed, and is accessible by the people who need it. Information on Demand ensures that all data, whether it is structured or unstructured data, can be leveraged for competitive advantage, by ensuring that information is trusted and encompasses the performance management tools to detect and respond to changing business conditions.

Organisations employing the Information on Demand strategy are able to unlock the business value of information and optimise business performance.