The Four Pillars of Enterprise Information Management

Information is in abundance, and it’s only becoming more so. The availability of information presents opportunities to create new value and optimize experience for both customers and employees. But leveraging information as an asset presents challenges and risks, including:

• The sheer volume at which data, and especially unstructured (data not easily parsed by basic algorithms) is entering organizations, which volume is only accelerating
• Inconsistent data sources  
• Data duplication
• Data inaccuracy, including data that was, at one time, accurate, but no longer is
• Data content inconsistencies
• Data security
• Data privacy
• Compliance with global regulations and industry standards.

The good news is these challenges and risks can be met via “Enterprise Information Management” (EIM), which is also known as “Enterprise Data Management” and “Master Data Management.” EIM is an aspect of Information Governance (IG), which is also known as Data Governance and refers to a business’s overarching policy for handling all information in any form, received from any source or generated by the enterprise, with the end game being the optimization of that information (i.e. maximizing value while mitigating risk associated with the information). You can learn more about IG here.

How is EIM different from IG?

IG addresses an enterprise’s overarching policies and strategies with regard to information. EIM addresses how those policies and strategies are carried out within the enterprise.

So what is EIM?

EIM is an integrative discipline for structuring, describing, and governing information assets across organizational and technological boundaries to improve efficiency, promote transparency and enable business insight. In other words, it’s not any one thing, and it can’t be achieved through the “plugging in” of any one solution or platform. EIM may be best understood as the following four pillars that support the structure of your business:

• Enterprise Content Management (ECM), which is a system for managing information flows across a business, from ingestion to archiving and disposition. Included within ECM is content digitization. Content digitization addresses, among other things, the challenge presented by inconsistent data sources and unstructured data. Also included within ECM is content organization and storage, which establishes rules for storing, sharing, securing, and culling information for use in business analytics and process automation. Exela’s ECM solutions leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), among other tools, for establishment and carrying out of such rules.
• Business Process Management (BPM), which is a system for routing your content-managed information into day-to-day processes, working across information siloes while maintaining data privacy as required by government regulation and business standards. The end goal of BPM is optimizing business efficiency while reducing enterprise risk. Exela’s BPM solutions make use of AI and ML, among other tools, to optimize employee experience at both the front-office and the back.
• Customer Experience Management (CEM), which sets up a process for culling your managed content to track and gain insight into customer interactions, make predictions, and optimize each part of the customer experience journey, from business generation to end-user-experience. Powered by AI and ML, among other tools, Exela’s CEM solutions help businesses to optimize customer experience, including by identifying and addressing customer needs and maximizing reach.
• Business Intelligence (BI), which refers to turning information into actionable insight leading to better decision-making and then making that insight work for you through consolidation, visualization, alerts, and search capabilities. Exela’s BI solutions include AI-powered information management and consolidation/centralization of search capabilities.

We’ll be discussing more about EIM and how best to implement EIM in future blogs so stay tuned to the Exela Blog. In the meantime, don’t miss this insightful thought leadership article from Exela’s President, Suresh Yannamani on how healthcare organizations can use EIM to prevent fraud