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What is the proper concern of the IT department of a modern enterprise - backing data up or making sure that data is available? The answer to that is obvious - the primary information management concern in the enterprise today is to ensure that the knowledge necessary to drive critical business processes is available where it needs to be, when it needs to be.
The costs of failure to do this are high. A recent study of 80 large organizations by Infonetics Research found that overall downtime costs averaged an astounding 3.6% of annual revenue! In another study, Forrester estimated the average cost of downtime for e-commerce sites at $8,000 per hour - at larger sites like eBay, Intel and Amazon, the costs soar to hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour. And research by Creative Networks, Inc. has shown that Microsoft Exchange downtime can also easily cost thousands of dollars per hour in a mid-sized organization.
On another end of the spectrum are the potential costs of legal exposure arising from losses of data covered by legislation like HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley. Speed is less an Real-time information management is issue here, but the cost of losing the information entirely about getting information where it could be devastating.
But what does real time really mean?
Real-time is usually associated with speed - a real-time system must be able to process information quickly and as events actually occur in order to respond in a timely way. Real-time doesn't actually mean fast - it means fast enough. What is fast enough for real-time response to one event, say a pilot's routine request for the status of some subsystem, is woefully inadequate for another, for example the need to take evasive action to avoid collision with another plane.
In other words, real time information management is about just what we said above: getting information where it needs to be when it needs to be, whether that is microseconds, minutes, or days.
From Data to Information to Knowledge
Finding adequate information management solutions requires understanding just what it is we are managing. Let's start from the bottom - the raw data.
Data is nothing more and nothing less than a collection of bits stored on some medium, a tape, disk, or CD. A sequence of random numbers is data, as is the collection of bits representing your current inventory. In and of itself, data has no real meaning, and hence no real value.
Until we understand how it is organized.
Information is organized data - and the organization gives the data meaning. When a collection of bits is understood to be ASCII text or a digital image, it gains meaning and, therefore, value. In the information technology world, this organization comes from applications -applications impose structure on data and thereby create meaning, and value.
Information that sits isolated is not especially useful. The tree may make a sound when it falls in the forest alone, but it has no bearing on anyone's life. Similarly, information only has impact when it is connected - connected to context, to other information, and most importantly, to people. This is the next level.
Knowledge is connected information and it is knowledge, therefore, that can actually cause things to happen, bringing the highest level of value.
In the end, only knowledge matters, because only knowledge can have any impact on your business. And so the task of information management is essentially to keep your information connected so that it becomes a part of the knowledge that drives your business. This is just a different way to say what we said at the start: the value of information for your business, and therefore the driver of your information management efforts, is ensuring that the right information is kept connected - or available - to those who need it, when they need it.
The Value of Knowledge
An obvious approach, then, is to maintain total connectivity - to keep all information online and immediately available to all users all the time.
This can be a fairly daunting task even in a static environment. In today's highly dynamic environment, with new information generated at explosive rates, a total connectivity approach is impractical - the cost of the required hardware, software and administrative resources is prohibitive.
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