My thanks to Jed Cawthorne at Prescient Digital Media for alerting me to a new report on Enterprise Information Management Governance that has been written by the Economist Intelligence Unit under commission from EMC. The first thing to say that any report from the EIU will be very well written and even if sponsored will tell it as they see it.

The briefing paper is based on an EIU research survey of around 200 senior executives from leading companies around the world about the benefits, challenges and risks associated with developing an enterprise-wide information governance strategy. The EIU say that the findings suggest a correlation between the commitment by a company to governing information and its capacity to mitigate risk and reduce cost, as well as getting more value out of its information assets.

Seventy-seven percent of respondents expect information governance to be important to their company’s success through 2011, while 68% also expect the complexity of their company’s information governance issues will grow during that same time period. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds (62%) of respondents indicated their companies had no formal information governance program in place, a concerning trend that may leave many corporations unprepared for new compliance mandates and open to preventable risks to sensitive information.

The survey results revealed key differences between the 62% of respondents that do not have formal information governance programs and the 38% of respondents that do have a governance programme. For firms without a governance strategy, the risks may be significant. Only 51% of respondents at companies that do not have a formal information governance strategy rate their overall ability to protect sensitive data as good or very good compared with 85% for those whose companies have a formal strategy.  40% of all respondents say their firm does not regularly review and revise information backup and retention policies and only 43% of respondents rate their ability to integrate and share information across departments and necessary third parties as good or very good. In fact 21% say that it is poor or very poor.

92% of respondents at firms with information governance strategies rate their company's ability to provide access to critical business information when it is needed as good or very good, compared with only 57% of companies that do not have governance in place. 57% of respondents admit they do not have a single view of the customer. 81% of firms with information governance programs report that information can be better shared between departments, allowing for better decision-making.

Even though the survey base is quite small the strength of evidence about the value of enterprise information governance (or enterprise information management) is very convincing, and given the reputation of the EIU it would take a brave CEO to say that the results were not representative or that their organisation can continue to flourish without an information strategy.

Finally a word of thanks to EMC for sponsoring the research. A report of this scale comes at quite a budget and it is good to see companies like EMC investing in creating senior management awareness about the benefits of information governance.

Martin White