In March this year Capgemini released The Information Opportunity Report. This report provides all the evidence you are ever going to need to convince senior executives that just investing in information technology without thinking strategically about information management is not going to have the expected impact on business performance. The report highlights the fact that organisations are generating increasing volumes of information but this simply is not reaching decision makers on time.

The 28 page report examines the issues of information exploitation in large private and public sector organistions, based on interviews with 125 senior executives.  There are four chapters, covering

• the importance of information,
• overcoming the failure to realise the potential of information
• three opportunity areas for information exploitation
• recommendations

On average businesses believe that by making better use of information they could achieve a 29% increase in performance. Scaled up across all FTSE350 companies this suggests a potential gain of £44 billion gross operating profit per annum. Think what that would do to the share price and dividends. In the case of the public sector the figure is 24%, which equates to £21 billion savings in administrative costs.

Quite the most concerning outcome of the survey is that 63% of respondents reported making business critical decisions five times or more a week without the right information. That's like catching a bus every day without knowing where it is going!

The three opportunity areas identified in the report are better performance management, information sharing between different parts of the organisation (and with external partners) and joining up information from different sources to form a single view of business entities.

The report has a wealth of tables that make me wonder just what Chief Information Officers are doing every day. It is an endless tale of lost opportunities and increased business risk.

There is a press release on the Capgemini site, from which the report can be downloaded. I am grateful to Tom Barton, from the PR Department of Capgemini in the UK for his help in obtaining a copy of the report. I would also commend the Global CIO Study 2008 that Capgemini has also published recently. This survey highlights that technologies, as well as users, are dramatically evolving and that there is a risk that IT departments will be spectators rather than participants in the evolution.

Martin White