Only few enterprises have a true information strategy

“The social Internet, inexpensive sensors, the Internet of things and other trends will cause an explosion in the types of information that are available. In this way, competition will increasingly be defined by differential access, control and value recognition and timely exploitation of information,” said Partha Iyengar, country manager for Research, India at Gartner. As business leaders reconfigure and re-skill their organizations in order to take advantage of these opportunities, Gartner has identified four key focal points for organizational development:

1. How will new kinds of information drive value? Who will be creative with that? How will they explore their ideas? What support is in place for information-led innovation?
2. As information improves in its granularity, precision or resolution, who will notice when key thresholds have passed and new things become possible that were not realistic before?
3. How will the organization search, discover, conjoin and secure the new datasets and information streams that are becoming available?
4.  How will they engineer the social and legal permissions needed to use information without it seeming like spying, privacy invasion or unfairness?

Leveraging the above effectively requires overlapping human, professional and organizational competencies. Sharpening each of them will be key to competitive success. In order to break through to higher levels of corporate enlightenment on information centricity, Gartner recommends three simple methods:

Method 1 – Visualize

To shift the culture of the business leadership of the firm to become more information strategy centric Gartner recommends to visualize what organizations already have. Computers today are able to render complex graphical representations cheaply and easily and creativity in visualization will become a key part of the competitive landscape in the second half of the information age. Companies that find better ways to represent complex information will win in better internal decision making capability and in better service products to their customers.

Method 2 – Vision and Breakpoint

Method two for creating breakthrough thinking among senior leaders is to create a visionary scenario for the use of some new kind of information and then plot its future. People are often much more willing to entertain big, challenging ideas if they seem to be a way off into the future — because they seem less threatening.

Method 3 – External Exposure

One way to get an organization to think about itself and its opportunities is to get others to comment. Organizations often listen to "outsiders" — peers, competitors, press, stakeholders, consultants etc. as much as to insiders. Many government information thought leaders are moving down this track. They believe that datasets buried in their own systems could be of far wider value and that, if exposed, they are more likely to be linked together in new and innovative combinations that might create more value. <link http: www.gartner.com>www.gartner.com