ABSTRACT
Business leaders and IT executives increasingly wax about how their company's information is one of its most important assets. Research from Gartner and others has shown how significantly investors and financial analysts favor information-savvy and information-centric companies. However, information is not recognizable as a balance sheet asset, and therefore never managed like one. Digital business and the information's emergence as a real economic asset, however, makes information ever more vital to the organization, intensifying the need for effective enterprise information management (EIM) initiatives. EIM cannot be implemented as a single project. Leadership issues range across all seven of the EIM maturity dimensions. Effective EIM for the digital business requires clear priorities that have the backing of an array of stakeholders, not just one business function. The lack of resources for advancing EIM capabilities is both real and perceived. Negative cultural attitudes have a perverse effect on EIM progress, creating enormous (but hard to identify) inertia.
