Top Challenges in Information Management and How to Overcome Them

Information Managers can no longer manage and govern their new information assets with traditional information scale management and governance approaches. AI-empowered and cloud-based information management and governance services are the most viable solution.

While information hyperinflation has been on the rise with the advent of generative AI and the broadening of collaboration across teams, remote working caused an explosion of content created and stored in a multitude of repositories.  

Recently, EncompaaS commissioned IBRS to conduct a research report to gain a better understanding of the perspectives, experiences, and concerns of senior information and technology specialists involved in managing Australian organisations’ information assets. This report shows that 33% of survey participants claim ‘knowing where information assets’ source of truth lies’ is a major challenge.  

The top challenges in information management are meeting privacy and security requirements while facing an ever-increasing volume of information.

IBRS’ research into how Australian organisations are managing their information assets shows that the highest-rated challenges include meeting privacy, security, and compliance requirements (49% rating a significant or greater challenge), managing information across multiple locations or sources (51%) and their inability to cope with the ever-increasing volume of information (52%). 

Additionally, 50% of participants stated that extracting value and insights from their unstructured data was one of their largest challenges, with a particular interest in identified contracts.  

Considering that organisations largely depend on information-sharing platforms like SharePoint, Teams and Exchange, the evolution of these platforms drives much of information management planning. IBRS wanted to determine how this impacts their ability to meet information management requirements. 

Largely, the impact was felt in establishing best practices for external or guest information sharing, with 35% of participants stating this as “the most challenging aspect of expanding the use of Microsoft 365 and Teams”. 

Information management teams can overcome the challenges of information hyperinflation with the use of content cognition.

With remote and hybrid work set as the new norm for many organisations, it’s likely the number of collaboration tools, digital workplace services, and customer-facing digital services will only grow. In order to keep pace from the explosion in collaboration tools, newer, AI-empowered and cloud based information management and governance services are gaining a rapid following.  

In fact, the IBRS report shows that 29% of organisations are already considering or experimenting with AI-empowered solutions, and 79% are interested in extracting data from unstructured information.  

This demonstrates that there is a strong appetite for advanced, next-generation information management tools that use cognitive services to discover, analyse, recommend taxonomies, perform auto-classification and apply governance rules over increasingly large volumes of information.  

Certainly the use of AI, and specifically content cognition services, is growing, as demonstrated in the IBRS report. IBRS classifies content cognition as the ability of AI to automatically inspect documents at scale and extract specific data.  

The report states, “One of the more advanced capabilities of emerging information management and governance technologies is extracting data (i.e. specific costs, budget items, dates, locations, terms, etc.) from unstructured data. While such ‘data extraction’ has been applied to narrow business capabilities, such as scanning invoices into core finance systems, it is only recently that AI capabilities have enabled this to be used across more broad use cases.” 

Our CEO, Jesse Todd, believes that augmenting organisations’ existing information management technology infrastructure with leading-edge AI-empowered solutions is essential to deal with the overwhelming growth of data at scale, as he states: 

“AI tools have become so sophisticated that we’re now able to extract critical data from complex documents with great accuracy. This completely changes the speed at which we can understand the context and value of critical metadata within documents, creating a powerful data quality layer that can be leveraged for business decisions.” 

“We are now seeing content cognition extract and collate critical commercial data from highly complex master service agreements with 30-40 amendments. This sort of contract analysis has historically taken several legal experts days to complete, and can now be done in minutes. Content cognition will completely transform the thousands of contracts organisations manage daily.” 

It is clear senior executives are now coming to realise the benefits of new AI technologies such as content cognition, and there is growing recognition of its value in enhancing information management.   

For more information on how AI will drive the next wave of information management innovation, download the full IBRS Report below or head to our dedicated IBRS Report Hub.