The modern enterprise requires information technology which is directly responsive to the business – providing high quality company-wide business information, using standardized unambiguous business vocabulary, and responding in real time to required changes in business processes. None of these business imperatives can be achieved when critical business information is stored and transmitted in hundreds of different formats or data schemas.

Enterprises are responding by investing in information management as an independent discipline within IT. The information management organization (also known as data or metadata management) is tasked with documenting where data is and what it means.

One feature of modern information management is that it no longer treats operational IT and informational IT separately. In order to achieve agility, the enterprise increasingly needs the ability to tie business intelligence directly into its transactions in support of flexible pricing, inventory, and more.

The goals of the information management organization include:

Semantic Information Management (SIM) provides such a methodology by allowing information management to be planned and executed in a consistent way with predictable ROI. Key to Semantic Information Management is capturing the precise business meaning of data – semantics – at all stages of data production rather than trying to add business meaning as an afterthought to business reports. This is achieved by mapping each physical data schema as a spoke to an Information Model that captures the desired business view.