As commerce becomes more complicated, and companies look to increase automation and collaboration, data is now emerging as a major market battleground. Enterprise Information Management becomes critical as companies move toward architectures that support business efficiency and agility by design.

Noble IT is specialized in finding solutions for optimal use of information within organizations, for instance to support decision-making processes or day-to-day operations that require the availability of knowledge. It tries to overcome traditional IT-related barriers to managing information on an enterprise level.

Information workers in their daily activities need access to both data (structured) and content (unstructured), as far as their role and responsibilities give them the appropriate rights.

Beyond the architecture and governance that will flow from IT management (which, by definition, will be managed from the center of the organization), various company domains have a vested interest in their own local reference data, as well as operating as consumers and subscribers to reference data from other domains, for example:

Enterprise Information Management is not a tool or technology, but rather, a combination coordinated with an enterprise-class strategy to create a semantic blanket for the organization, independent of any one application or business domain. Enterprise Information Management demands attention from CIOs and business leaders. The actions embedded in the research that make up this Spotlight require resources. If decisions aren't made, and resources are not applied, IT organizations will fall behind in their support of business goals, and businesses will be harmed. Enterprise Information Management will become critical as more and more companies look to move beyond "integration one application at a time" and toward an architecture that supports business efficiency and agility by design.