Like all of you, I care a lot about the future of our country’s economic well-being. I know that I’m not exactly alone with my concern, and so I’m interested in ways to translate that concern into something real...NOT something political. Last week’s posts, many of which centered on the notion of keeping less to get more value from what we have, kind of lead me here. What those posts and comments did was get me to chew on this idea of clarifying the business value of efficient information management. There are all sorts of reasons for managing information well, but there is one reason that gets the attention of every business owner, shareholder, and CEO, and should get the attention of any government influencer as well: Managing information effectively not only pays for itself, it can enhance profit margins.

I’m not sure about you, but in this economy, that could mean the difference between a company staying in business or not! Once, not too many years ago, a client asked us to estimate the value that implementing a new information management and technology program would provide them. Saving you the gory details on net present value and free cash flow calculations, I’ll give you the punch line: For them it was a positive impact to profitability of $22 million (USD) per year! And that was only basing that margin improvement on 40% of their operations. What could your organization do with profitability improvements like that? How closely correlated do you think good information management is to corporate profitability? Could this be the kind of investment our economy needs today? What do you think?