White Papers

Making information work for your business: the information imperative

• Tags:
• picture,
• decisions,
• realize,
• lines

Overview After people, information is perhaps the most valuable asset within an enterprise and one that requires thoughtful management to truly realize its worth. Organizations recognize that information in all forms, and from all sources, is essential to running their businesses. The most widely anticipated benefit from information technology (IT) investments is information availability. However, the many applications, processes and technologies designed to handle corporate data in most companies have spawned separate silos of accumulated, frequently redundant, information. As a result, valuable data, both structured and unstructured, may not always be accessible to all the users and processes that need it.

Industry research shows that the average large enterprise often implements three different enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and may operate more than 48 different financial systems. Buying individual packaged applications in hopes of getting a more comprehensive picture of the entire enterprise has caused additional challenges. Each new application tends to create its own set of information, rendering it impossible to make decisions based on a unified view of all facts.

Gaining visibility into all the information produced within an organization, putting it in context and driving effective action based on a complete picture of the latest information are great challenges in business today. The most valuable insights are transformative — they enable you to uncover the hidden strengths of your product lines, implement better ways of running your business, discover new ways of approaching the market and learn how to better drive competitive advantage.

• 
• Did you find this white paper useful?

• Subscribe to the IT White Papers Newsletter
• White Paper RSS