New York: 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, yet less than half
consider it an important item for funding, staffing or measuring, according to a
Nemertes Research benchmark survey of 43 IT professionals at 42 organizations.
Information stewardship crosses several strategic issues, from SOX compliance to
growth in data volume.
Nemertes says that most of its study respondents do not have a person or
group dedicated to managing information stewardship. In addition, 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.