Information Management: An Imperative for High Performance

Business information is generally scattered throughout an enterprise, in separate systems dedicated to specific purposes such as enterprise resource planning, supply chain optimization or customer relationship management.

Large organizations can have more than 100 repositories of information. In many cases, integration among these disparate systems is limited—as is the ability of users to access all the information they need through unified points of entry.

Providing efficient access to large volumes of information is just one of the challenges facing organizations. Managing information effectively is an equally—if not more—daunting task. The days of simply managing the structured data of enterprise systems are over. Now, organizations must also contend with unstructured materials, as well as questionable data quality from external sources—most notably, the Internet.

At the same time, CIOs must ensure data security and compliance with continually evolving regulatory requirements such as those dictated by Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II or the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Issues of information access, management and security are often indicators of an even more serious challenge—information degradation. An environment of information degradation and disorder—where people do not understand what data means or how it can be useful—can significantly limit organizational performance for businesses and governments alike.

Against this challenging backdrop, it is common to implement point solutions focused on data integration, data warehousing, document management, customer reporting or ad-hoc analysis activities to solve one specific problem and believe they constitute effective information management.

We respectfully disagree. And we have created Accenture Information Management Services to work with clients specifically to tackle the information challenge.

Accenture's Approach to Meeting the Information Management Challenge
Based on our expertise and proven track record helping organizations optimize their use of information, we believe that effectively tackling information management challenges calls for a focus on integrating people, processes and technologies to regain control of information and drive high performance for the long term.

Leading-edge information management capabilities:

• Encompass all types of data—from internal and external to structured and unstructured.
  
  
• Embrace the entire information lifecycle—from acquisition to storage to cleansing to integration and, ultimately, analysis.
  
  
• Entail not only the technology for managing information and ensuring security, but also governance models, enterprise standards and practices, policies, roles and responsibilities associated with these activities.

Our approach to information management applies an integrated perspective to overseeing all the diverse information assets necessary to plan and run a business.

An Accenture survey of 300 CIOs globally indicated that the potential damage posed by aging or incorrect data is deeper and more widespread than generally believed.

The study also revealed notable gaps between CIOs' existing data management capabilities and their targeted goals in two key areas:

• Knowledge workers' ability to use and analyze data to perform their jobs effectively.
  
  
• The organization's enforcement of data quality standards across the enterprise.

Getting Started
Paramount to our approach is standardizing terminology and helping clients understand how an optimized information management capability can enable high performance.

By looking beyond immediate needs and problems to see the larger, longer-term benefits of a well-defined information management plan, we are able to work with clients to develop a holistic information strategy that will support their overarching business goals.

Next, we leverage the Accenture Information Management Diagnostic and the Accenture Information Management Solution Map, which prepare the organization for change.

Once the opportunities have been identified and prioritized for maximum business impact, Accenture helps develop a comprehensive framework for moving forward. This framework focuses on building skills in four strategic disciplines—governance, delivery, data architecture and storage—that, together, form the cornerstone of a superior information management program.

Specifically, Accenture:

• Helps clients develop and implement the standards, guidelines, procedures, roles and responsibilities necessary to enable consistent, reliable and secure access to information.
  
  
• Provides a number of key assets and approaches to streamline and improve the electronic delivery of structured and unstructured information.
  
  
• Helps clients capture necessary information, improve data accuracy and optimize a number of data management areas—from migration and integration to transformation, cleansing, modeling and conversion.
  
  
• Assists clients in storing their information in a way that is easily accessible, consistently defined and clearly understood. Further, we help clients address the full range of administrative functions—including monitoring, archiving and retrieving—necessary to manage the complex landscape of data storage solutions.

Paramount to our approach is standardizing terminology and helping clients understand how an optimized information management capability can enable high performance.

The Accenture Information Management Diagnostic enables us to accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of our clients' existing information management efforts across six core areas:

• Strategy
• Governance
• Delivery
• Data Architecture
• Storage
• Security

The diagnostic also allows us to help clients define the target state of their desired information management capabilities and informs business case development for specific improvement opportunities.

Armed with an understanding of the clients' information management capabilities and goals, we leverage the Accenture Information Management Solution Map to jumpstart the development of a more effective information management program.

The solution map complements the planning phase of the Accenture Delivery Methods, which apply standard methods and tools to create solution delivery platforms that are reliable, repeatable and enable high performance.

Partner with a Leader
As a leading management consulting and technology services provider, Accenture is uniquely positioned to help CIO organizations develop and implement effective information management capabilities.

In addition to providing a holistic approach, Accenture Information Management Services' professionals deliver a number of proven solutions. Our specific service areas include:

Business Intelligence
Our business intelligence group focuses on helping clients collect and analyze external and internal data to generate value for their organizations. Helping clients design and deploy data warehouses, data governance, analytical applications, real-time reporting and analysis, and performance management solutions encourages the transformation of data into insight.

Content Management
We help clients design and implement content management architectures that enable the storage, processing and retrieval of any type of content fragment. These solutions also allow the distribution of this content to users via one or more channels. With content management architectures, Accenture also helps clients store and manage any discrete electronic file as meaningful content.

Portals
We deliver portal applications with robust functionalities that include content aggregation, personalization, administration and search capabilities. With a well-designed and well-executed portal architecture, clients benefit from access to personalized content that comes from multiple sources, integrated into one website.

Data Management & Architecture
Based on our extensive experience, Accenture has developed a structured approach to the creation of data architecture solutions. We cover the broad spectrum of data management needs including data governance, data quality assessments, modeling, cleansing, extraction, transformation, loading and storage. We therefore offer a comprehensive framework to ensure a cohesive understanding and use of data throughout the enterprise and improve data accuracy, consistency and standardization.

Service-Oriented Architectures
Our service-oriented architectures help clients integrate systems more easily by leveraging standards-based design patterns that are either foundational or composite. The foundational design patterns enable project teams to design individual services, while the composite design patterns allow teams to design an entire service-oriented architecture solution. Regardless of which option is best suited to a client's need, these design pattern solutions come with an overview of the pattern and its benefits, as well as a business example.

Security
We provide a host of security services based on reusable common security architecture components that have been documented and packaged to facilitate easy re-deployment. Our goal is to help our clients achieve consistency and standardization across their organizations for common security functions such as authentication and encryption.

Storage
Storage and storage management are rapidly evolving technologies—and rapidly growing areas of concern for clients around the world. With storage vendors fighting for market share and offering an array of products and services, Accenture helps clients identify and implement the storage architecture solutions that will best support their information management strategy.

Accenture provides deep expertise in each of these areas, and helps clients understand the harmony between these strategic disciplines and physical architectures.

Accenture helps NIST maximize the value of its information. Accenture teamed with the US Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to design and implement a holistic information management strategy.

The cornerstone of this effort was the creation of the Commerce Business Systems Portal, a launch pad for integrated access to more than 15 business systems and related content for NIST and the nine Department of Commerce bureaus it serves. Leveraging the agency's existing data storage systems to serve as the backbone of its information management solution, the portal offers users real-time, centralized access to data through a streamlined user interface. Although information delivery was the team's primary focus, new governance practices were also implemented as a key solution component.

For NIST, the result has been better decision making. According to Teresa Coppolino, NIST, CFO Business Systems Division chief: "Before we implemented the portal, users often had to make management decisions based on two- or three-week-old data that had to be manually reconciled. Now that users can access their business systems and data through the portal, they have more time to spend analyzing integrated data that they know is current and can make more informed management decisions based on that data."

Other characteristics that distinguish us in the information management space include:

Our Experience
Since the early 1990s, Accenture has helped hundreds of clients in many industries around the world maximize their information to improve their organizational performance. Along the way, we have continually refined our insights and practices to deliver the information management solutions that support enterprise strategy.

Our Delivery Approach
By using the Accenture Delivery Suite—which comprises a comprehensive set of proven methods, processes, tools and architectures distilled from our collective experiences and innovations—our global teams consistently and reliably deliver end-to-end information management solutions and higher levels of performance on time and at a lower cost.

Our Delivery Centers
We have a highly efficient network of 40 delivery centers around the world that leverage repeatable processes, world-class assets and highly skilled onshore, offshore and near-shore resources. We draw on these centers to deliver fast, cost-effective, high quality solutions.

Our Alliances
Accenture is vendor-independent, committed to delivering information management solutions that will best meet our clients' needs. That said, we constantly evaluate the information management landscape to identify providers we believe can help our clients achieve high performance.

Our Thought Leadership
We are committed to keeping Accenture at the leading edge of information management. For example, Accenture Technology Labs combine deep technical and scientific expertise with business know-how to create unique solution assets such as predictive monitoring approaches and knowledge discovery tools. Additionally, our information management practitioners work with our industry specialists to develop new industry-specific strategies and toolsets while our technology experts steadily refine our delivery approaches. In all these ways, Accenture continually develops and enhances its best practices, approaches and assets to deliver the most effective information management solutions for our clients.

As organizations face increasing pressure to acquire, store, manage and analyze more—and more valuable—data, many of them are turning to Accenture for help. Our proven holistic approach and deep capabilities in information management help businesses and governments optimize their use of critical business information. As a result, our clients are able to make informed decisions, run their businesses more effectively and take a significant step on their journey to high performance.