Information doesn't just provide a window on the business, increasingly it is the business. The global economy is moving from products to services which are described almost entirely electronically. Even those businesses that are traditionally associated with making things are less concerned with managing the manufacturing process (which is largely outsourced) than they are with maintaining their intellectual property.

Information-Driven Business helps you to understand this change and find the value in your data. Hillard explains techniques that organizations can use and how businesses can apply them immediately. For example, simple changes to the way data is described will let staff support their customers much more quickly; and two simple measures let executives know whether they will be able to use the content of a database before it is even built. This book provides the foundation on which analytical and data rich organizations can be created.

Innovative and revealing, this book provides a robust description of Information Management theory and how you can pragmatically apply it to real business problems, with almost instant benefits. Information-Driven Business comprehensively tackles the challenge of managing information, starting with why information has become important and how it is encoded, through to how to measure its use.
From the Inside Flap

"The question that any organization needs to ask itself is whether it is using information to create the most dynamic, responsive, and adaptable enterprise possible or is it using information to satisfy the need for power by a privileged few?"
—from Information-Driven Business: How to Manage Data and Information for Maximum Advantage

Managing information has become as vital to a business as managing financial information is to its accounting functions. With information pervading every aspect of your organization—from reporting and marketing to product development and resource allocation—it only makes sense for your business to turn its data into functional knowledge that powers revenues, manages costs, and achieves a consistent level of profitability.

Drawing from techniques that author Robert Hillard has applied in some of the world's largest companies and government departments, Information-Driven Business reveals how business leaders can more effectively govern, manage, and exploit their company's most important asset: information.

Authoritative guidance is provided on the Internet's role in creating our information economy; measuring the quantity and usability of information; the goals of information governance; describing structured data; the role of master data management; and defining an enterprise information architecture.

In almost every organization, executives and even technology professionals are increasingly being made accountable for the mountains of data that exist in databases, file systems, and other repositories. Information-Driven Business helps your business become information-centric and attain significant benefits as a result.

How wisely or poorly your organization manages its information will drive its success or failure. Realize the greatest possible value for your business with the solid guidance found in Information-Driven Business. Its easy-to-apply techniques show you how to pragmatically apply it to real business problems, with practically instant results.