Information Management

What is Information Management?

Information management (also IM) concerns a cycle of organizational activity: the acquisition of data, information, applications, and services from one or more sources, the custodianship and the distribution of that data, information, applications, and services to those who need it, and its ultimate disposition through archiving or deletion.

Information Management Up Until Now

Matching Demand for Services with the Availability of Services

Up until 2017, Information Management has mainly focused on the IT department visiting business departments and doing an inventory of their issues, needs, and requirements concerning data, information, applications, and services.

Based on the results of the inventory of data, information, applications, and services, new ones were realized and obsolete ones were abandoned. Yearly, the planning was made when what data, information, applications, and services were acquired or built and when they would be implemented or provided to users.

This often led to long waiting times for the business, and they often did not get what they wanted. If the waiting times took too long, they sometimes even bought a solution, not fit the corporate standards, and was hard to integrate with the rest. Ultimately causes technical debt, cost explosions, unnecessary complexity, and other risk-increasing aspects.

Dragon1 can be used perfectly to do an inventory for the need of data, information, applications, and services, and design, develop, implement them, and monitor their usage, incidents, and issues.

BISL is a framework for Information Management. Dragon1 supports working with BISL.

SaaS, Cloud and Virtualization as New Technologies

Information Management from now on does not have anymore these long waiting times. New technologies like SaaS, Virtualization, and the Cloud made it possible for new data, information, applications, and services can be tried, tested, implemented, and provided within minutes, hours, or days. This enables iterations with the business on what they need, where before that was not possible.

The cloud can be seen as a flexible network provided via the Internet that can be scaled up in no time: if you want extra computers, storage, or servers, just order them and seconds later they are available.

Virtualization can be seen as software versions of hardware. If you have 1 physical server and you install software on it, that physical server can emulate thousands of physical servers.

SaaS can be seen as Software as a Service. If you want a new CRM system, HR system, or Stock Inventory system, create an account on a website, log in and you have your new system.

These three technologies together enable fast, scalable, and reliable professional IT infrastructure for small and large enterprises.

Currently every organization is or should be moving all of its IT to the cloud, of course taking security into account, but not moving to the cloud will put your company behind its competitors.

Big Data and Artificial Intelligence

Today we do not have to delete data anymore. Data storage is so cheap we can archive everything we would like. This enables a new concept called Data Lakes: an unstructured huge set of archived data. And having tons of data enables you to do data mining, you can search for patterns you can use to make better decisions.

Another new technology is called Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning. AI is about using (instant or historical) knowledge of the behavior of humans/users to hint and guide them directly or indirectly. And of course, data lakes can be used for this, but also everything we know about the behavior of people. Think of Artificial Intelligence as the second pair of brains you get with an IQ of 200.

Dragon1 supports data mining and discovering the possibilities of artificial intelligence by designing new services for the organization.

Cyber Security is Information Management Security

The downside of innovation and technologies is that criminals get smarter. One of the things that every company in the world is facing is cybercrime. Constantly criminals are trying to enter your computer systems and steal your data or disrupt your operations.

Dragon1 supports cybersecurity by enabling you to design and implement security business processes, information systems, and IT infrastructure using enterprise architecture. This ensures security at a mature level and that all security principles are implemented effectively.

GDPR for Information Compliance

Important to mention here also is GDPR: General Data Protection Regulation. From now on we need to make clear what type of data is in which system. If certain data is sensitive, like personal client data, that data may not be stored in certain systems or not be exchanged with certain parties. How you are going to handle client data has to be transparent under the order of GDPR.

Dragon1 supports working with GDPR and even extends it. You can create or generate visualization showing what type of data is in which type of system and if that complies or breaches certain regulations.