Gartner has identified four major innovation forces that will impact the future of information infrastructure. As organizations begin to turn their attention toward planning for economic recovery, understanding and harnessing innovative approaches and technologies related to these forces will accelerate their return to growth.

• A majority of organizations are limited in their ability to derive business value from their data and content-related tools and technologies.
• The concept of information infrastructure is gaining recognition with organizations seeking to adopt enterprise information management (EIM) principles and approach information management from a strategic point of view.
• The nature of information management technologies and their deployments are rapidly changing as a result of several key forces impacting the discipline.

• Organizations need to identify break-through approaches to dramatically increase their information management competencies and deliver on the promise of the information infrastructure. By exploring and harnessing four key information infrastructure innovation forces, organizations can take steps toward the goal of managing information as a strategic asset, and the promise of pervasive availability of information services supported by the information infrastructure:
  • "Smarter" information infrastructure.
  • Information as an asset and liability.
  • New ways to deliver information infrastructure capabilities.
  • People and information infrastructure.

Several information management "grand challenges" have frustrated enterprises' ability to leverage information as an asset (see "Information Management Grand Challenges: Opportunities for Resolution"). They are: 1) unlocking/exploiting information diversity, across the range of the content continuum; 2) tackling information overload as the volume of information grows much faster than the ability of people and technology to harness it; 3) developing an information-centric organization which views information as a strategic asset; and 4) successfully recognizing and acting on patterns in data, content and events to develop a pattern-based strategy.

Gartner has identified a set of key innovation forces within information infrastructure — significant changes in the way that information management technologies (link to "Top 10 Technology Trends Impacting Information Infrastructure in 2009-2010" here) and competencies will be focused and delivered, with the goal of radically improving the cost-effectiveness, agility and transparency with which information assets are managed and leveraged. These innovation forces will address critical pain points — the "grand challenges" — for organizations attempting to increase their information management competencies. The innovation forces are:

• "Smarter" information infrastructure — Automating the processes of understanding meaning, relationships and the importance of information assets.
• Information as an asset or liability — Approaches for determining the relative value and risk associated with specific information assets.
• New ways to deliver information infrastructure capabilities — Improving the cost models and agility of deploying information management-related infrastructure.
• People and information infrastructure — Emerging considerations regarding the impact of information accessibility on people and society.

Organizations seeking substantial improvements in their ability to leverage information assets should begin to explore these innovation forces and the specific emerging technologies and approaches that are driving them. By harnessing the innovation forces and their inherent technologies and approaches, organizations can make progress toward resolving the "grand challenges" they face in establishing an effective information management discipline (see Figure 1).

Historically, the better known storage mechanisms (relational databases) and applications (business intelligence, content management and transactional processing) neither had access to all useful information nor could fully exploit the information that was accessible. Businesses are realizing the value of such information access and the information infrastructure that must evolve to enable it. However, there is substantial complexity and challenge in describing and organizing data and determining meaning and relationships across dissimilar schemas and models. Currently, these challenges are addressed with massive amounts of manual effort and time on the part of technical IT resources (database administrators, content management application administrators, data and content modelers and so on). And because these individuals generally do not fully understand the business meaning, context of use and value of information assets, their determination of rules for how data should be integrated and delivered (to whom, when, and in what context and format) will often be inaccurate and incomplete, leading to degraded business value from their efforts.

The innovation force of smarter information infrastructure is about emerging technologies and approaches for automating the discovery of meaning, relationships and the context of information assets, reducing or removing the need for technical personnel to deeply understand the data and develop models and delivery mechanisms that, by the time they are implemented, may no longer be aligned with fast-changing business requirements. With smarter information infrastructure techniques and supporting technologies, the discovery of meaning and relationships across the full spectrum of the content continuum (from highly structured to loosely structured) can be automatically inferred, and decisions about information delivery can be made at a more abstract level, without dealing with the details of the physical structures of the data. Through such approaches, a substantially higher degree of agility in adapting where, how, and in what form and context information is delivered can be achieved. These developments will enable organizations to make substantial progress in addressing three of the "grand challenges":

• Information diversity — Understanding the meaning of information assets at all points on the content continuum.
• Information volume — Automating the identification of facts and events of interest; humans can focus only on what is important.
• Pattern recognition in information and events — Discovering relationships, which are not obvious to people, across diverse and voluminous data sets.

Specific topics and technology developments for this innovation force include the evolving use of metadata, data/information services, content analytics, inference modeling and semantic technologies. The strategic planning assumptions highlighting the impact of this innovation force include:

• By 2015, the increased maturity and adoption of semantic information modeling techniques (such as ontologies) will enable two-thirds of the information management-related tasks currently performed by IT to be automated and executed by business roles.
• By 2011, IT will allocate 75% of information management resources (people, systems and software) to integrating and analyzing a blend of traditionally structured and diverse data types, whereas today 75% of resources are focused only on structured data.

If the great financial meltdown of 2008 has demonstrated anything, it has certainly demonstrated that the traditional financial metrics that have dominated the world of business performance reporting and management are rubbish when it comes to prediction. These financial metrics have dominated the world of business performance measurement for many decades, and it is the rare financial management professional that cannot align his or her own predictions and results on a quarterly basis. When it comes to looking ahead, or more to the point, underneath, the cover of the numbers, other factors are clearly operating. Most businesses seem to have no insight into what these are, or if they do, the outside world is not interested in examining them, because they are non-financial, non-numeric and worst of all "intangible." Yet clearly these things are important, because they are predictive, rather than retrospective, and long-term, rather than short-term. It is time to introduce a little "art" along with the "science" of corporate performance management. It is time to try and determine the value of information and its effect on the profitability, agility and longevity of companies.

Information valuation as an innovation force describes the practice and approach of determining the actual and potential value to the organization of a specific information asset. Economic value is not always the desired outcome. In the case of citizen services coming from government, information assets will create value, but not a directly measurable one in terms of the bottom line. The goal of measuring the value of information is to align it with critical business processes and determine how much organizations should invest in governing and managing information assets, and the way in which they need to build out their information infrastructure to meet their information delivery goals. These developments will enable organizations to make progress in addressing several of the "grand challenges":

• Information volume — With techniques to determine the value of information assets, people and systems can more efficiently focus on the subset of data that requires attention.
• Information-centric organization — Similarly, organizations can more effectively allocate their scarce resources by ensuring governance of only those information assets that hold great value or potential risk.
• Pattern recognition in information and events — Given the massive volumes and great diversity of data types managed by the typical organization, the detection of patterns in data will be difficult without first limiting the scope of analysis. By focusing on signals and events related to those data assets with the greatest value to the organization, the chances of discovering relevant patterns increases.

Specific topics and technology developments for this innovation force include approaches to measuring the value of information assets, and the "physics" of information value (potential vs. kinetic value). The strategic planning assumptions highlighting the impact of this innovation force include:

• By year-end 2012, updated information asset valuation methods will yield a 10% to 15% increase in the return on assets.
• By 2012, 60% of Global 2000 enterprises will realize material IT and business cost savings from their investments in EIM initiatives.

Enterprises' information infrastructure and new delivery models, such as cloud computing, give users new options for managing information delivery. Emerging disruptive events are occurring in licensing and delivery models affecting various aspects of the information infrastructure, including the need to manage and integrate data residing in the cloud, such as when using software-as-a-service applications. Information infrastructure will increasingly be migrated to emergent tools and platforms, as older technologies in this space are met with constraints or fail to keep pace with the requirements of modern, Web-based applications. Additionally, alternative delivery models for IT, as an emerging trend in acquiring IT capabilities, relieve some of the common challenges in delivering on the promise of information infrastructure, particularly in the areas of flexibility, scalability and cost. However, barriers to the adoption of alternative delivery models exist in the near term.

New ways to deliver information infrastructure capabilities, such as cloud computing and other emerging delivery models (for example, appliances, utility computing and community sourcing), will be a substantial force that organizations can leverage to more rapidly and fluidly deliver on the information infrastructure vision. The flexibility to procure and implement various components of the information infrastructure at the point and time of need, without significant investment in building out the underlying computing infrastructure on-premises, will create significant opportunities for organizations. However, at the same time, the lack of clarity regarding the implications and best practices for dealing with information sourced by, moving through, or persisted within cloud-based implementations will inhibit the adoption of such techniques. These developments will enable organizations to make progress in addressing two of the "grand challenges":

• Information diversity — Cloud-based infrastructures, where the manner of persistence is transparent to the consumer and Web-oriented techniques are used to identify and relate disparate information assets, hold the promise of simplified, consistent interfaces to all kinds of data across the content continuum.
• Information volume — By leveraging elastically scalable infrastructure and appliances, organizations can manage (and hopefully derive substantial business value from) massive volumes of data at a much lower cost than ever before.

Specific topics and technology developments for this innovation force include the evolution of the information infrastructure itself, cloud-based infrastructure for persisting, integrating and delivering information assets, and the movement of technology infrastructure providers toward becoming information/content service providers. The strategic planning assumptions highlighting the impact of this innovation force include:

• By year-end 2011, 30% of information management activity in Global 2000 enterprises will involve at least one technology component implemented in a non-traditional IT delivery model.
• By year-end 2012, 50% of enterprises using applications "in the cloud" will experience severe business disruption due to the lack of rigorous data management practices applied to external data.

While an increasing number of organizations agree that they need to increase their competency in managing information, few have put in place the right roles, skills and organizational structure to fulfill their vision. In effect, managing information is nobody's job. Business and IT leaders must reset their expectations as to organization, process, duties and roles when it comes to managing information at the business-unit level. Formalizing the roles associated with managing information in both IT and the business units, giving the individuals who fill these roles appropriate and purpose-built tools to do their jobs, and training them in the standards and processes used to manage information, are necessary steps toward harnessing the power of information infrastructure. In addition, the manner in which individuals want to consume information is changing. The ability to personalize the delivery of information (in terms of timing, format and context) dictates that information infrastructure capabilities be much more flexible and dynamic than ever before. Static, "one size fits all" approaches to delivering information, such as many organizations have implemented over the years in the reporting capabilities available in their operational systems or even in their data warehouse implementations, will no longer satisfy the wide range of constituents that must be supported.

The increasing involvement (and mandate) of business personnel to be actively involved in driving the requirements and behavior of the information infrastructure is an unstoppable force that organizations must quickly accept. True management of information assets cannot be carried out by the IT organization — it is the role and responsibility of the business to set and enforce the policies by which information is managed. In addition, with more and more individuals in the organization having access to and increasing control over information assets, it will be critical to implement proper governance methods to ensure appropriate and ethical behavior by individuals interacting with data, while supporting the ideals of ready availability and flexible leverage of information. Organizations that can successfully harness the engagement and behavior of people in their information infrastructure will have an advantage in significantly addressing two of the "grand challenges":

• Information-centric organization — By establishing the proper roles in the business for truly managing information, as well as the governance models to ensure desirable behavior from those who interact with critical information assets, the organization will have made a major shift toward driving its actions based on information needs.
• Pattern recognition in information and events — Without specific enterprisewide roles for information management and proper behavior from everyone in the organization, information silos make it impossible to identify patterns which manifest via signals or events occurring in multiple systems, functions or business units.

Specific topics and technology developments inherent in this innovation force include the evolution of business user-friendly tools and technology to facilitate roles such as information managers and data stewards, and a shift in information-related resources from IT into the business units. The strategic planning assumptions highlighting the impact of this innovation force include:

• By year-end 2011, there will be twice as many new positions in roles related to information management, mostly outside the IT organization.
• Through year-end 2010, more than 25% of personnel in all disciplines in IT will have a "matrixed" reporting relationship with a specific business unit.
• By year-end 2011, 75% of global organizations will have a formal EIM team in their organizational structure, composed of a combination of IT and business resources.