This is a guest post by John Mancini, Chief Evangelist at the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM). If you have industry research or expertise you’d like to share and would like to submit a guest post for our blog, send a pitch to coletted@surveymonkey.com.
Every organization is on—or should be on—a Digital Transformation journey. In a recent AIIM survey of technology decision-makers, 79% said their organizations realize that they must transform into true digital businesses in order to survive.
But standing in the way of these Digital Transformation good intentions is a tidal wave of information chaos that can disrupt even the most well-intentioned transformation effort.
At the root of this chaos are two factors—information volume and information complexity. On average, organizations expect the volume of information coming into their organizations to grow from X to 4.2X over the next two years and they expect over 60% of this information to be unstructured (like a contract or a conversation) or semi-structured (like an invoice or a form).
The only way to navigate this chaos is by making information management a core strategic priority. 73% of organizations now see Information Governance as “important” or “critical” to their business strategy.
We recently partnered with leaders in digital transformation to identify trends in how organizations undertake these governance initiatives. Here are 7 of our takeaways (also reflected in the infographic above):
1. The percentage of organizations saying that they have “robust, enterprise-wide information governance policies” nearly doubled over the past five years—from 14% to 25%.
2. The perceived risks associated with an Information Governance failure are expanding beyond the original concerns focused on legal risk:
- Loss of customer confidence or bad publicity from data loss – 41%
- Regulator action from loss/exposure of personally identifiable information (Data Protection) – 38%
- Loss of intellectual property or company confidential information – 35%
- Excess litigation costs or damages resulting from poor records keeping – 34%
3. In general, organizations understand that they are not investing sufficiently in Information Governance capabilities. 43% of organizations feel they are spending too little relative to information risk, while only 14% feel they are over-spending.
4. Perhaps the greatest change over the past five years has been the increasing adoption of tools to automate the governance process and make governance as invisible as possible to the average knowledge worker. 53% of organizations see automation of information governance processes as “highly important” or a “game changer.”
5. There is a “pull” in organizations to take basic information capture capabilities and extend them as part of their broader transformation strategies. 70% of organizations see the link between AI and their future success.
6.Only 38% of organizations see themselves as “advanced” or “highly advanced” in adopting Artificial Intelligent tools to automate the process of information governance.
7. Only 42% of organizations see themselves as “advanced” or “highly advanced” in the use of machine learning to use the actual content of a document or record to automatically extract and populate its metadata, clearly an opportunity for many organizations.
The time for change is now. Leading organizations understand these core Information Governance trends and are structuring their strategies around them:
- Relative to five years ago, there has been a modest but definite shift in the strategic importance organizations place upon effective Information Governance.
- The risk/benefit profile that organizations attach to Information Governance is becoming more mature.
- New approaches are needed when it comes to internally “selling” Information Governance.
- First generation tools are being widely used to move beyond legacy paper-based records management strategies and automate core Information Governance processes.
- There is a clear gap between good intentions and reality when it comes to the adoption of next generation tools like AI and machine learning to automate Information Governance.
Want to read more? Check out the full report here.
