Business Information Unification - are you ready for more responsibility

You can see the need for ebusiness integration falling onto the CIOs desk and indeed where would the board turn to with enterprise application integration?

But Business Information Unification refers to much more than these added headaches, now we are concerned with the information held within the applications, the data we all hold so dear, together with its business use and its integration with other systems.

Set to become a top priority of senior managers in future, Business Information Unification is the convergence of unstructured-content management tools and portals with the content of enterprise systems and legacy applications creating unified content across an organisation increasing the value of that most prized asset a company's data.

Together with staff resource and financial capital, information is now one of the most important assets of any company. If the CIOs didn't have a huge responsibility before they do now and should be rated accordingly.

The CIO now manages the entire responsibility for the organisation's information assets, they decide on hardware and software architectures as well as on the relevant policy, set service level agreements, are key to any disaster recovery strategy, are responsible for prioritising new applications (which can mean the difference between success and failure of the company).

But, unlike most managers, CIOs can't have an off-day. They can't tread water for even a minute, because, unlike most managers, they are under scrutiny at all times - a system slows up and the entire organisation knows about it.

For example, what are the reasons for the failure of any ebusiness project? Projects are not always destined for success even with the right software. No strategy, lack of experience, a trial-and-error approach, and complexity was underestimated, customer demand was grossly overestimate, and time scales were incorrect.

Choosing the wrong software is also high on the list of mistakes. Just because it says 'sales' on the box does not mean it will bring business in through the door.

Organisations have to start to understand the diversity of the CIOs role. They are predominately seen as implementers of applications rather than the visionaries behind decisions that clearly affect information as a resource and, as a result, a company's business.

IT strategy requires a long-term view. With the need for information to become more integrated within the business the need for the CIO to make the leap between IT manager and general business strategist/manager is all the more necessary.

It appears that although most senior manages do give some thought to ERP and ebusiness, they have not thought about the need to integrate these applications. They usually leave the technical subjects to the IT department, who try to manage this costly task more or less without board intervention.

By concentrating on their business critical applications, companies lose sight of the information stored within them. Furthermore data integration is discussed in isolation at departmental and application levels creating still further silos of information throughout the organisation, which defeats the aim of the exercise by preventing the users from accessing the information within the applications.

Create a Proper Enterprise Storage Management System
Data integration, which, given its relevance to strategic decisions, becomes a matter for the most senior of managers, involves much more than simply mastering integration at data level. In the final analysis, it involves the integration of information or content stored in a wide variety of applications.

The CIO must recognise this integration as of strategic value to the company in order to recognise one of the company's most important assets - information. Therefore, it is the CIO's task to make unlimited access to information the goal of every IT-related decision.

Businesses need to manage growing demand for data as well as increasing volumes of data. Its reality is one of endless storage complexity and escalating costs.

The complexity comes from an endless number of proprietary, server-enslaved storage islands, each with its own quirks and proprietary management tools. Some devices are bursting at the seams, unable to take another megabyte, while others sit idle with storage to spare, unable to share it with applications and users.

The cost comes not from the physical storage unit itself, but rather from the cost of managing the storage infrastructure, which has ballooned to five times the physical cost per megabyte. In fact, research firm Gartner estimates that only 20 percent of storage costs come from the storage hardware itself -administration accounts for nearly 15 percent; backup and recovery, 30 percent; and downtime 20 percent.

If CIOs are going to be faced with the dilemma of dealing with Business Information Unification then their first stop is to ensure they have a robust Enterprise Storage Management system in place. What are the factors to take into account when selecting a storage vendor?

Is it price, integration possibilities, virtualisation, scalability? Simply, the most important criteria must be its ability to manage the data processing, manipulation, management and transformation capabilities of the storage systems.

The future of storage is a company's lifeline to its operation and customer base. Any vendor must have the vision and technological road map to look to the future as well as come up with a solution for today.

Critical and mandatory are technical support, consulting integrity and seamless integration with existing hardware and software used. Price? Well with the millions saved by ensuring the operation is up and running 24x7 why are we even discussing price?