This book is about interesting and exciting new developments in the area of information management. These developments are focused on new ways of structuring, choosing, understanding, and integrating information that is needed to run a business, service customers, and comply with numerous regulatory requirements.

To paraphrase Claude Shannon, the “father” of information theory and the concepts of information entropy, information is that which resolves uncertainty. Our entire existence is a process of gathering, analyzing, understanding, and acting on information. Progressive resolution of uncertainty is the key to the way we make business and personal decisions. The need to sustain new regulatory pressures and achieve competitive advantages by managing customer-level profitability and risk-adjusted return on investment drives profound changes in the way business and government organizations operate. Traditional account-centric and application-specific silos of business processes restrict organizations’ ability to meet the aforementioned challenge. Therefore, in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive global and dynamic markets, businesses are making serious investments in the new customer-centric processes and technical capabilities. These new capabilities should allow organizations to effectively select, acquire, understand, and manage accurate and relevant information about customers, products, partners, patients, inventories, prices, and other areas of business concerns.

In doing so, enterprises are collecting and processing ever-increasing volumes of information, especially as business conditions change, markets shrink or expand, companies grow organically or by acquisitions, and customer retention becomes one of the key business metrics.