‘Information Stewardship’ Huge Issue for IT Execs in 2006,
But Many Enterprises Lag In Strategies
NEW YORK, NY, Dec. 19, 2005– Eighty-seven percent of IT executives say information stewardship – managing and setting policies for every byte of data in the enterprise – is vital to their organizations, according to a ground-breaking research benchmark from Nemertes Research. Yet only 40% rank information stewardship as important when it comes time to put money and resources behind it. Most do not have a person or group dedicated to managing information stewardship. And fewer than half of IT professionals have done actual return-on-investment calculations regarding the process.
“Information Stewardship: Holistic Data Management in the Enterprise,” investigates Nemertes’ newly developed concept of information stewardship, which comprises five key disciplines: information protection, compliance, data-quality management, information-lifecycle management, and disaster recovery.
IT managers highly value these disciplines as their companies are increasingly being asked to respond almost instantly to customers, competitors and the market at large based on real-time, organized and accurate data.
Nemertes Senior Analyst Melanie Turek spoke with dozens of IT executives who shared their information-stewardship challenges, best practices and thoughts on vendors. Issues include:
• A staggering increase in the amount of data that resides within their organizations (12% of IT executives cite data growth as their biggest challenge);
• The desire to stay out of the news for a sensitive customer-data breach;
• Increased pressure to comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley (which affects 65% of benchmark participants), HIPAA (55%), the California Database Breach Notification Act (42%), the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act (35%), and the European Data Protection Directive (35%).
Although 63% of IT executives say their companies are aware of the concepts behind information stewardship, it’s often embraced only in theory. “But they do clearly understand the business problems that can occur with poor information stewardship,” Turek says.
When asked to describe their most critical information-stewardship challenge, 30% of IT executives singled out data-quality management (DQM). The majority (61%) of IT executives said the quality of data in the enterprise is a “vital” issue. Despite that fact, though, only 26% of companies are using any kind of technology to manage DQM, and much of what’s in use is home-grown, Turek says. IT executives are wise to use the tools, however: Among companies that report using some type of DQM technology, 63% say their efforts in the area are “very” or “extremely” successful; that number drops to just 35% among companies that are not using such technology.
The benchmark also looks at data storage, security measures and business-continuity planning, and draws on input from 43 IT professionals at 42 organizations across a range of industries.
Nemertes Research is a leading research that specializes in quantifying the business impact of technology. For more information, visit www.nemertes.com.
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