Big G claims that the with all this big data swimming around, companies are headed for a huge crisis. No doubt the answer of course is to hire analysts to help out, and Gartner happens to know at least one firm that could do the job for a fee.

In a report issued this morning Gartner predicts that, by 2017, 33 percent of Fortune 100 organizations will experience an information crisis, due to their inability to effectively value, govern and trust their enterprise information. Andrew White, research vice president at Gartner said that there is an overall lack of maturity when it comes to governing information as an enterprise asset. Organisations, unable to organize themselves effectively for 2020 are unwilling to focus on capabilities rather than tools, and not ready to revise their information strategy, will suffer the consequences, he said.

Business leaders need to manage information, rather than just maintain it. "When we say 'manage,' we mean 'manage information for business advantage,' as opposed to just maintaining data and its physical or virtual storage needs," said White.

"In a digital economy, information is becoming the competitive asset to drive business advantage, and it is the critical connection that links the value chain of organisations."

The discipline of exploiting the various types of information created and managed inside and outside organizations is called enterprise information management (EIM). IT leaders must design EIM initiatives so that sharing and reusing information creates business value, and the value created must contribute to enterprise goals.

Ultimately, an EIM program must help an organization identify which information is important to its success — not all information is. It must evaluate a great deal of information and determine what qualifies as enterprise information. Gartner analysts said that, at present, over three-quarters of individual information management initiatives are isolated from each other within the same organisation. This leads to EIM not being realized, sustained or fully exploited.

“We recommend that IT leaders identify the crucial business outcomes that need improvement or that are being held by poor information management,” White said.

Companies need to determine the business processes and leaders most impacted by those outcomes, and use their findings to start setting priorities for a new EIM program. Finally, they need to adopt a program management approach for EIM, to identify work efforts, resource commitments, stakeholder expectations and metrics for success.