Excerpts from the interview:

Can CEOs benefit from IT metrics — relating to information management and security — on their dashboards?

In the current information age, for a business to succeed there are many considerations, and one of those is to align its IT (information technology) to the business.

Economic downturn has prompted companies to introspect and look inwards to find ways and means to cut costs and derive maximum efficiencies. With the growing amount of information entering an enterprise, it is not surprising that information management and security have taken a seat at the table of key priorities before the CEO of any company.

Over the years, as the amount of information grew within an organisation, the share of technologies in the information infrastructure of an organisation grew and this figure is now a significant percentage of the IT budget of any business. The growth of storage and information infrastructure solutions is a natural result of the rate at which information is increasing.

Globally, the 2009 IDC study has predicted a fivefold growth over the next four years. The amount of digital information created in 2008 grew 3 per cent faster, or 16 million gigabytes more, compared with IDC’s prior projection. Every 18 months, our ‘digital universe’ is expected to double.

What is now clear is that businesses will need information management solutions that will account for the challenges associated with the expanding information in the ever-expanding digital universe. This clear asymmetry between information and the availability of storage is the single most important driving factor for Indian CIOs to invest in storage virtualisation, information lifecycle management, security and backup and archival technologies. In other words, CIOs will have to invest in total information infrastructure solutions.

Information is an asset, and is an extension of the maxim that knowledge is power; and organisations that can manage and harness their information assets in a secure manner are best positioned to emerge as leaders. In this context, information management and security must be on the dashboard of any CEO who wants to take the organisation to the next level.

What are the factors that impede the deriving of optimal benefit from available information?

First, there is a lot of information within the repositories of an organisation. Business information comes in many forms: text documents, spreadsheets, pictures, XML files, etc. It also has fixed content such as reports, records, and scanned images. The common thread in all this is that this information is largely unstructured. A recent survey of Indian CIOs revealed that nearly 20 per cent of all information tends to be unstructured.

Second, with IDC predicting a five-fold growth in information by 2012, we are going to see a lot more information, largely unstructured coming into organisations. Thus, the growth of unstructured data poses the greatest challenge to the proper utilisation of information.

To ensure, therefore, maximum ROI (return on investment) on an organisation’s information assets, what is required is an enterprise content management system that provides a systematic solution for capturing, organising, storing, and delivering unstructured content within an enterprise and beyond.

D. MURALI

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