How You Can Maintain A Good Information Management Process

Tools for Information Management Process

Good information management benefits your business in several areas, improving communications, streamlining operational processes, and guiding decision-making and planning. Today’s technologically advanced business environments mean that data sources are more numerous and diverse than ever before, so clear assessments of information quality and relevance are vital. Search strategies and retention policies are similarly needed to get the best out of your resources. With such demands, it pays to have the right tools for your information services management.

The Value Of Good Information Management Processes

Businesses can amass information from many different sources. With resources from technical data sheets to operational instructions, customer records and profiles, financial data and many more areas, it can be hard to keep track. The variety of content and formats, plus the technical complexity, can make it difficult to extract business value from such diverse information. An effective information management framework enables you to determine what data you need to keep and for how long. It also helps you assess the quality of records and identify gaps that need to be filled for a comprehensive information profile. Well-managed information facilitates search and retrieval to support operational efficiencies and better business decisions. It also helps to secure compliance with regulatory frameworks such as the EU’s GDPR (in the UK, now integrated into the Data Protection Act 2018) and other governmental bodies.

Assessing Quality And Relevance

Not all the information your business encounters is relevant or important. Collecting irrelevant or inaccurate data not only wastes time in itself but also makes it harder to find the right resources later on. Data management tools can help determine the value of datasets, records and documents with established business taxonomies. This enables you to strip out information that is misleading, duplicated, or irrelevant. It also helps you rank your retained resources using targeted metadata.

Determining The Right Retention Strategies

It isn’t wise or legal to keep all information indefinitely. Storage costs accrue and effective retrieval becomes more difficult. What’s more, under current data protection law, businesses are legally obliged to dispose of certain types of data depending on their retention policies. With many different types of files and data sources, a comprehensive retention strategy is needed that can still account for these differences. Information management solutions direct the disposal of expired data regularly to ensure compliance and maintain a current dataset.

Improving Search

One of the key values of information management is improved visibility for search processes. Using metadata, your content can be structured logically and consistently using taxonomies that match your business processes. By identifying the hierarchical relationships between data entities, the right information can be found faster. This relationship-driven approach, along with rich alias functionality, means that users can retrieve relevant resources without needing to know specific identifiers in advance.

Choosing Information Management Tools

Your information management process needs the right software. Flare Solutions’ data management tools help you organise your data resources to maximise their value for your business. Using metadata for each data element identifies their situation within information taxonomies. Creating hierarchies and relationships between different entities means that they benefit from meaningful inheritance of key attributes. The result is better search visibility and accessibility to other applications that consume data.

Next Steps

For more information or to find out more about our Sirus data management and intelligent search suite, please call 02033977766 today.

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