There was a good article written yesterday by Adrienne Baker entitled Look Outside IT for Information Management Success which appeared in Information Management magazine and I thought worthy of sharing. It looks into a recent Gartner report that predicts that by the end of this year, 40 percent of people who report into IT will have substantial business and non-IT experience. This touches on a trend that we at StoredIQ are very familiar with – today more than ever before – IT decisions encompass more than just the needs of the IT department. In almost all engagements our sales and operations teams engage with many constituents within an organization including IT, legal, records managers, as well as compliance and risk officers. Each has a stake in the buying process with different needs; all understand that a siloed approach to information management is counter-productive – none the less, building a consensus can be tough.
According to the article, as organizational investment in data governance, risk and compliance increases, the demand for people with insight into both the legal and data management sides of the house rises as well. This year, Gartner expects 20 percent of Global 2000 companies to add a litigation support manager to establish policies, design and execute discovery exercises for regulators, and mediate between IT and legal departments.
As traditional business roles merge with IT we will see more hybrid job functions emerge and a continued widening of the IT decision process to include non-IT stakeholders. There will be some growing pains as each distinct group learns to work in tandem to ensure that information management projects are successful. As the old saying goes “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger”.
