Earlier this month, we attended the AIIM Leadership Council Summit in Newport Beach, Calif., to participate in a roundtable discussion on information management. We enjoyed networking and having conversations with industry peers and other AIIM members about how organizations are managing their information, the regulations governing it and what we (as solution providers working with AIIM) can do to help them. Discussions revolved around some of the key concerns or issues that have kept organizations from fully embracing information-management programs, among them lack of attention from the C-suite and terminologies that are confusing (e.g. data versus information).
For those information-management professionals who were unable to attend this year’s event, we’ve recapped some findings from new AIIM research that was presented, along with the main discussion points and other noteworthy topics that were explored.
Organizations Are Failing to Align Information-Management Strategy with Business Strategy: The average business-alignment grade for organizations is a C-. Companies simply do not fully understand the importance of having these two strategies in lock-step. For 57 percent of organizations, their alignment attempts have stayed the same (which weren’t good in the first place) or have gotten worse.
An Information-Management Program Based Solely on Risk, Compliance and/or Regulations Fails to Move Things Forward: Unfortunately, many organizations let regulatory, legal and business requirements dictate the creation of a particular record type and drive the associated processes involved with that information—versus focusing on what the company’s core mission is. Twenty-five percent of executives only give priority to an information-management program if it directly helps “move product.”
Leveraging Information to Improve the Customer Experience Is the Secret Sauce for Successful Alignment: More customers are online and are forcing organizations to make process changes. Companies with strong information-management programs are successfully driving revenue and growth by empowering teams to make faster, data-driven decisions, improving brand reputation and seeing the rewards of “good will” income from returning customers. There is still ample room for improvement as only 36 percent of companies have made that connection between information management and the customer experience.
Information Access, Process Automation and Data Analysis Are Key Capabilities: Companies that do have an information-management strategy that aligns with their business strategy concentrate their efforts in these three areas: 1) Process improvement (44 percent); Information access (29 percent); and Data analysis (16 percent). Those organizations with higher alignment scores were, not surprisingly, the ones better able to foster content collaboration across distributed workforces and organizational boundaries. The need for these capabilities will only become more important to HR departments as companies place more focus on employee retention and strive to deliver acceptable levels of work-life balance.
Make Information Management More Strategic for Best Results
Organizations that have built effective information-management programs focus on developing strategies that support the company as a whole, as opposed to using them in a purely operational sense. Based on others’ successes, the benefits companies can expect from strong information-management programs include:
- Increasing revenue and/or growth
- Improving the customer experience and/or outcomes
- Retaining customers and/or employees
- Reducing e-discovery costs
- Improving brand reputation and good-will revenues
- Enabling data-driven decisions
- Empowering teams to make decisions (versus escalating to the C-level)
- Driving continual innovation with automated integrated processes
- Changing processes to sustain employee retention
- Reducing environmental impacts
Is your company looking either to take that first step to building an information-management program or jumpstarting one that has seemingly stalled? Contact one of Docufree’s experts today to help your organization build and maintain a successful information-management strategy that aligns and supports your business strategies into the future.
