Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
The New Information
Management Paradigm
The ubiquitous nature of data and the promises it has shown for enterprises
necessitates a new approach to enterprise information management.
What Is Enterprise Information Management?
For an enterprise to carry out its functions, it needs an ecosystem of business
applications, data platforms to store and manage the data, and reporting solutions to
provide a view into how the enterprise is performing. Large enterprises with multiple
strategic business focus areas need many such applications, and as often seen, over
the years the enterprise landscape gets into a spaghetti-like situation where it becomes
incomprehensible to articulate which application and which data store does what!
Various reasons can be attributed to such a state: lack of enterprise-wide data standards,
minimal metadata management processes, inadequate data quality and data governance
measures, unclear data archival policies and processes, so on.
In order to overcome this problematic situation, enterprise information
management as an organization-wide discipline is needed. Enterprise Information
Management (EIM) is a set of data management initiatives to manage, monitor, protect,
and enhance the information needs of all the stakeholders in the enterprise. In other
words, EIM lays down foundational components and appropriate policies to deliver the
right data at the right place at the right time to the right users.
Figure
2-1
lists these foundational components and describes the roles they play in
the overall business and IT environment of any organization. The goal is management of
information, data, and content to meet the needs of the business.
