Information is Shared

Necessary access to accurate information is essential to improve the quality and efficiency of the decision-making process of the financial institution. It is less expensive to maintain integral information in a single application and share that than to maintain duplicate information in multiple applications.

• The company has plenty of information, but it is stored in hundreds of incompatible databases. The speed in which information is obtained, created, transferred, and absorbed is driven by the organization's capacity to effectively share these information islands throughout the company.
• Shared information promotes better decisions because they are less dependent of less-reliable sources and information managed in the decision-making process.

• To enable information sharing, a common set of policies, procedures, and standards must be developed and followed to regulate information management and both short-term and long-term access.
• In the short term, to preserve a significant investment in existing systems, investments in software capable of migrating information from an existing system into a shared information environment are required.
• Normalized data models and metadata that define such shared environments must be developed, in addition to a repository to store the metadata and make it accessible.
• As existing systems are replaced, common information access and developer guidelines must be adopted and implemented to ensure that all information in new applications remains available in the shared environment.
• In both short and long-term, common methods and tools to create, maintain, and access shared information must be adopted throughout the company.
• Information sharing implies a significant cultural shift.
• The information-sharing principle is constantly confronted with the information security principle. Information sharing must not compromise the confidentiality of information under any circumstance.
• Shared information must be used by all collaborators to perform their respective tasks. This ensures that only the most up-to-date and accurate information is used in the decision-making process. Shared information shall become the only virtual source of University information.