We hear the word revolution constantly as a marketing term. Your local restaurant may declare the arrival of a culinary revolution, but will it actually affect you with any real significance? Probably not.

However, when we talk about the information revolution, it is true in the purest, most undiluted form of the word.

According to IBM, we created 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day in 2012 (that's a number that has 18 zeros in it). In other words, if each byte was a mere millimetre in size, lining up just a day's worth of information would stretch all the way to Pluto and far off into the galaxy.

The explosion of information three years ago was so significant that it represented 90 per cent of all the data created in the entirety of the human race pre-2010!

Now, in 2015, every minute of every day ends with 72 hours of new YouTube video content and 204 million new email messages published and shared, according to Domo.

A real revolution indeed – and one that is really only just getting started.

Viva la business revolution

So, what does this mean for businesses? Well, for one, they're not just able to create more information and digitalise it for quicker access, but they can find and use data created by potentially billions of third-party curators.

Customers, employees, board members, state authorities and near countless other people create information that can be useful to the business. Whether the business wants to understand their customers' personal preferences to a greater extent, engage their employees in a new way or manage business-critical information, it is all out there in the digital universe… somewhere.

And that's the new issue: the filing cabinet is no longer the go-to place for information; today, the World Wide Web or internal digital storage is the norm.

However, there's a missing link in the chain. This information is being mismanaged on a huge scale; all that precious data is not being utilised, as businesses struggle to govern and manage it on an organisation-wide level.

Your data is screaming out for attention

One of the great things about the information revolution is that data comes in from all angles – through web content, email, intranet and and the collaboration environment. And yet, business leaders don't know what to do with it – many don't even know that it exists.

In the meantime, key pieces of data that could help to make an important business decision are being stored away every day somewhere within the information architecture. But this could be proof that an upcoming strategy won't work, or conversely that the time is perfect to launch that new product the company has been sitting on.

These nuggets of information are screaming out to be heard, though businesses are just burying their voices under more shovel loads of unorganised, unstructured data.

Why are businesses uninterested?

The key term here is uninterested, not disinterested. Business leaders certainly have a stake in the outcome of data mismanagement, though they remain impartial to treating their information assets in the way they would their financial ones.

Quoting a Ventana study, a recent report from Oracle titled 'CIO Information Matters' expressed that the three largest obstacles to following through with information management projects are:

• Insufficient staffing (68 per cent of surveyed businesses quoted this as a problem);
• An inadequate budget (63 per cent);
• Insufficient training and skills (59 per cent).

And yet, when information assets impact upon every other resource in the modern business atmosphere, shouldn't managing them effectively be high on the list of priorities?

We think so, and have seen businesses fall or fly based on their use of information. This is why Experience Matters helps businesses to treat their information assets as they would their financial, human and physical ones.

Many businesses know that approaching the information management issue early saves them from doing so later on when the problem is compounded and the pile of unstructured data infinitely larger. With EM's help, they can create business-wide governance, develop staff to use information in the best possible way through training, while at all times keeping that all-important budget intact.

To learn more, give us a call on 61 438 429 144 or contact us online.