Unlike a product that’s never been seen before or a cutting-edge marketing strategy, managing information more effectively is guaranteed to improve how a business operates. After all, organizations only do four things: manage financial assets, manage physical assets, manage human assets and manage information assets. Generating improvements to any of these things will have a significant, tangible impact on an organization.
The challenge, then, is in determining the exact nature of the impact information management will have and articulating its benefits in terms that make sense to executive leadership and will compel them to act, i.e., provide funding and support.
The best way to articulate the value of information management in terms a business leader would respond to is to adopt a relentless skepticism, to keep asking, “So what?”, until you reach a compelling answer.
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Step one in improving this business case is to spend time thinking about how to quantify what happens when we give workers 12.5% of their time back. One of the best things that can happen (from the executive’s perspective, of course) is to reduce head count because this is a direct and tangible impact to operating expenses. A close second is reallocation, i.e., moving resources from one area to another, which either saves the organization from having to spend money on new hires or shifts resources to higher value work (or both).
Unfortunately, in the case of our efficiency example, neither one of these is going to be a likely outcome of giving folks 12.5% of their time back, so we need to look further. After reducing/reallocating headcount, your next best option is to find examples of specific business processes that are being negatively impacted by the time employees spend looking for the information they need, such as accounts receivable, sales and customer service. For these kinds of business case justifications, you need to also calculate the amount of the improvement achieved. For example, determine what the rate of receivables aged over 45 days was and then gain agreement from your accounts receivable team as to the reduction they felt comfortable with based on better information management—the same would go for the sales and customer service examples.
Although we've only scratched the surface of making your information management business case more effective, hopefully you can see already how much improved it is over that initial save of everyone’s 12.5% of their time justification. If you’re looking for real-life examples for such business cases, join me at Connect-IT in Greenwich, CT, where we will dig deeper into finding real business value that your leaders care about.