Information strategy

Information strategy springs from business strategy. Information strategists work to develop explicit statements of information needs and their relationship to business goals.

Information strategy should cross the boundaries of business units and systems. For example, many different parts of an organisation may need to access information about customers. For some teams, it may be sufficient to access functional data, such as contact details. For others, it may be important to access market data, forecasts, commentary and the insights of colleagues. Most often, customer information is dealt with on a system by system basis. This usually leads to incompatible and incomplete information that is difficult to manage and use.

An information strategy identifies the stakeholders in the organisation and prioritises what they need to know. It documents the information currently available to them and identifies gaps. It looks at stakeholder contribution as well as consumption.

This work benefits the organisation by:

• Supporting strategy work
• Identifying and filling gaps
• Reducing duplicated effort and cost of acquiring information from external sources
• Standardising information for completeness and efficient management.