The smallest first step
A proof of value: thirty consultant days, at cost
One scope you name, an invoice flow, a personnel file, an archive nobody dares switch off, worked end to end, with a written answer at the finish.
Scope a proof of valueInformation Value Management
Information as an asset with a value, a cost and a lifecycle. Five strategic questions, four operational capabilities, and what each of them is worth.
What Information Value Management actually is
Every company knows what its stock costs to hold. Almost none know what their information costs to hold.
Information Value Management closes that gap. Five questions decide what has to be true of your information. Four capabilities make it true.
The five questions
What has to be true of your information, in the order the questions are usually asked. The fifth is the one that pays for the other four.
Information strategy
What information the business will need in three years, what it is carrying now that it will not need, and which of the two the current estate is built for. This question is usually answered by a software selection instead, which is how estates end up designed by whoever won the tender.
Information governance
What must be kept, what must be deleted, who may reach it, and how any of the three would be evidenced to an auditor or a regulator.
Information quality and security
Whether records are complete, current and correct, and whether they are protected in proportion to what they are worth. These are one question rather than two, because they fail together: nobody protects a record they do not trust, and nobody trusts a record anyone can quietly change.
Information lifecycle and architecture
Where information lives from creation to disposal, how it moves between systems, and what shape the estate has to be in for that movement to be ordinary rather than a project each time.
Information value and economics
What the estate costs to hold, what it returns when it is used, and what a change to either is worth. This is the layer that makes the other four fundable, and it is the one most often missing.
The four capabilities
Strategy is not what a company buys first. These are, and which one comes first depends on where the estate actually is rather than on where the strategy would like it to be.
The two outcomes underneath it
Nobody funds a discipline. They fund a result, and in practice there are two. Both sit under Information Value Management because both are answers to the same question: what is this information worth, and what is it costing.
Cost take-out
The money that comes back out: fewer systems to license, fewer people moving data between them, and estates decommissioned rather than carried indefinitely because nobody is sure what is inside them.
AI readiness
The reason the first four questions have suddenly become urgent. AI is only as good as the information underneath it, so records that are current, governed and traceable are the precondition rather than the ambition.
Where this starts
Rarely at the top of the list. Most engagements begin inside one process that has become expensive enough to notice, and the wider questions get answered on the way through it, because the process cannot be fixed without answering them.
That order is deliberate rather than a concession. A strategy nobody has paid for stays a document. A process that pays for itself and settles three of the five questions while it does so is how the rest gets funded.
The same work, seen from two ends
Secure Information Management names the capabilities: governance, document and process automation, integration and migration, service management, managed operations. Information Value Management names the reason to apply them and the basis for deciding what applying them is worth.
A conversation that starts at either end reaches the other within an hour.
Secure Information Management, in fullNobody buys a strategy layer on its own, and we would not sell one. The first conversation is usually about a process that has become expensive enough to notice, and the wider questions get answered on the way through it.
Information Value Management, asked plainly
What is Information Value Management?
Treating recorded information as an asset with a value, a cost and a lifecycle, rather than as a by-product of the systems that produce it. In practice it means being able to say what your information is worth, what it costs to hold, what obligations attach to it, and what a change to any of those three would return.
What are the five areas of Information Value Management?
Information strategy, information governance, information quality and security, information lifecycle and architecture, and information value and economics. The first four decide what has to be true of your information. The fifth decides what making it true is worth, which is the one that makes the other four fundable.
How is Information Value Management different from data governance?
Data governance covers structured records inside systems: ownership, definitions, quality and access for data held in tables. Information Value Management covers the whole estate, most of which is not in a table: contracts, invoices, personnel files, drawings, certificates and correspondence. The two overlap at governance and diverge everywhere else, and an organisation can have a mature data governance programme while none of its documents are governed at all.
Where does an Information Value Management engagement start?
Almost never at the top. Most start inside one process that has become expensive enough to notice, and the strategic questions get answered on the way through, because that process cannot be fixed without answering them. A strategy nobody has paid for stays a document.