“Cutting costs” is an unfortunately myopic view, especially for a public corporation. If cutting costs today winds up losing even more revenue (or costing more) tomorrow, then the company has lost shareholder value. This is exactly the kind of thing we like to show people with decision modeling. For example, there’s an upfront cost in moving to EDM, but it likely saves (and creates revenue) in the longer term. A “cost-conscious” CIO might delay installation of an EDM system on this basis, but a more detailed analysis of shareholder value including future decisions, uncertainties, and payoffs would likely tell the CIO that more shareholder value is generated by moving early.

“Contributing to the creation of new business strategies” is an interesting one too. IT departments are (amongst other things) stewards of vast amounts of corporate information. This information is potentially valuable for making better decisions at all levels and across silos. But information volume and complexity continues to grow, and humans are already overwhelmed. EDM provides a solution for extracting the value of this information in high-volume structured decisions. If CIO’s want to go a step further and contribute to business strategies at all levels and decision types, they need to facilitate the use of this information to assess shareholder value of decisions, freeing human creativity from the yoke number crunching and futile mental gymnastics.

I don’t know if you noticed, but there are a few more pages to there article with other categories. I think you’ll find the other items relevant to EDM as well.

Dave