Steve Mills Talks to Forbes About the Need for an Information Agenda

Steve Mills was recently interviewed by Forbes magazine to talk about how organizations can deal with all of the information now being captured, and use it more effectively to improve their business.  You can read the full transcript in their article Drowning in Data.

He talks about the opportunity for companies to change how they do business and use information for competitive advantage.  He also raises the issue most organizations are facing, which is navigating information overloads to figure out what information they need, and what information is right.

He references an interesting example in banking:

If you look at a large bank, they have a whole set of product offerings ranging from retail banking to brokerage. They have various private customer relationships--trust, annuities and insurance. You may have a variety of accounts, but do they know you as one person? Do they have a master customer view of you so they can up-sell and cross-sell? For most major banks, the answer is, "No, that's a work in progress." Therefore, they miss opportunities to leverage the capacity of their integrated financial institution. In most cases they have a road map to fix that, but they're struggling to get there.

In this article, he suggests that establishing an Information Agenda can help companies get started, and ensure they are investing in the appropriate infrastructure to support more effective use of information.