The Growing Need for Information Literacy

Think about your organization for a moment. Is there any employee who doesn't collect, store, transform, analyze, and delete information? We all need information to be successful and help our organizations achieve better business outcomes.

Information is a strategic asset and vital for better decision making and for functional, successful AI solutions. ​

Defining Information Literacy

Information literacy is the understanding of the full information lifecycle and how information can be leveraged to achieve better business outcomes.

Those who are information literate understand information is a strategic asset. They also have some level of ability to identify information needs; critically evaluate the quality and integrity of information; extract useful insights; and maintain information in compliance with governance policies.​

Information literate employees understand the fundamentals of information management-- how to collect, store, share, leverage, or delete information in a compliant and responsible way.

Information Literacy Increasingly Important

Data literacy is similar enough to information literacy that you can look at research about data literacy to draw some conclusions about information literacy. After all, information is just data.

Research points to the Growing importance of data literacy. According to Harvard Business Review, 90% of business leaders citedata literacy as key to company success. Forrester research found that ​70% of employees are expected to work heavily with data by 2025 and 82% of leaders expect all employees to have basic data literacy.

By extension, information management and information literacy are also becoming increasingly important. In AIIM's 2023 State of the Intelligent Information Management Industry, we found that 79% of survey respondents believed information management would become more important in the next two years.

The importance of information management will continue to increase in the age of artificial intelligence. At AIIM, we consider information to be both structured data and unstructured data. However, the unstructured data represents the larger percentage of known data. Unstructured data includes social posts, text messages, invoices, audio, emails, documents, and more. In other words, it is the fuel for generative AI. There is an increasing need for quality unstructured data as source for generative AI and a need to manage the unstructured output of generative AI applications.

How do you improve your information literacy?

If you are new to the practice of information management, start with the fundamentals by seeking courses and materials in Information Literacy and Information Management.

Browse AIIM.org for great articles explaining the industry. Relevant courses are available on LinkedIn Learning, such as this course on Information Literacy. I also highly recommend AIIM's Certificate of Specialization in "Intelligent Information Management Essentials." In this learning pathway in AIIM's online learning library, you'll learn how to:

• Create and Capture Information
• Extract Intelligence from Information
• Digitalize Information-Intensive Processes
• Automate Governance and Compliance
• Implement an Information Management Solution

AIIM+ Pro members can access this pathway and other courses as part of their membership. All AIIM members can download a complimentary copy of the Certified Information Professional Study Guide. This study guide can help prepare you for the CIP exam, but it also clearly maps out the fundamentals of the information lifecycle and is a great resource on its own.

If you are interested in improving the information literacy of your team, learn more about our team membership options.

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