A few weeks ago I was sitting with Hideo Yanagi and Daniel Kraft talking about how what we do fits into the big picture of enterprise information management. Hideo said “What we do is just the opposite of a spam filter”. What a brilliant intuition!
Most companies spend thousands (or even millions) on spam protection. And don’t get me started on the amounts spend on branding and content creation.
There is a healthy market for controlling incoming information (just ask Symantec, TrendMicro, McAfee and others) addressing the first market. There is also a huge (and bitterly contested) market for internal business information – the long list of combatants includes Autonomy, EMC, Google, IBM, Open Text, Oracle, SAP, etc.
But there is something missing. Who is looking after outbound information?
What are companies doing to ensure that outbound information is as safe as incoming information? Who is making sure that outbound information is as searchable and reusable as internal information? How are companies sure that branding is assured and your information is compliant with national or international regulations?
The answer is, surprisingly, almost no one.
There are some smart companies starting to connect the dots – for instance by trying to agree Information Quality standards across departments such as Marketing, Engineering and Support. But this is currently being driven almost exclusively bottom-up by practitioners, rather than in response to a strategic initiative.
Think about this just in terms of branding: according to about.com, branding is easy:
You [succeed in branding] by integrating your brand strategies through your company at every point of public contact.
Clearly “every point of contact” means more than just the website. It means all your customer communication.
It seems to me that CIOs and CMOs need to be developing an Information Quality Strategy – to work out how they want to communicate as a company with their customers. It might at the same time be a good idea to work out some tactics to make sure they can enforce company policy on information that will go to customers. This includes everything; from the website, advertising and pre-sales materials before the deal is done, to technical support and after-care material for the rest of the customer’s time with the product.
What are the risks of not doing this? Well, I have seen time and again how disconnects between marketing, sales and support lead to products losing their key differentiation in the market. The costs of disconnected product information for global companies can be dramatic. If you are trying to deliver information to a global support organization in local languages, a successful Information Quality Strategy can reduce costs by up to 30%, or, as I prefer to think of it, you can be selling products in four markets for the price of three.