What's the difference between data and information? Something tells me it's like the difference between knowledge and wisdom, between amateur and pro, between last century's CIO and this one's."Being a CIO who can provide not only the infrastructure but the right tools is a real challenge," says Greg Todd, senior executive within Accenture's Information Management Services practice. Todd is talking about Accenture's new research report, "Cultivating High Performance Through Information Management," based on interviews conducted with 162 CIOs in March.

Like global peace, information management is an ambitious goal, more honored in the talking than in the doing. Information management involves integrating structured data, like that found in relational databases and ERP systems, with unstructured data, such as documents, graphics, e-mail, and the increasing amounts of audio and video content -- "the majority of what's being stored in companies," says Todd. Then, serving up that integrated information to the right people at the right time across the enterprise.

According to Accenture's report, three quarters of the CIO respondents say they intend to develop an overall information management strategy in the next three years. That's because, say 62% of the respondents, enterprise information management will help them achieve competitive differentiation. "An effective IM capability is a means to outgrow the competition," says Todd.

But information management isn't easy. For one thing, unstructured data is just that - unstructured -- ergo, hard to get at. According to a data point in Accenture's report, the surveyed CIOs rated their users' access to unstructured data today at about 3 on a scale of 1 to 5. That seemed a bit, uh, optimistic to me. To Todd, too. "When I look at the clients I serve," he says, they're not "as mature or advanced as the CIOs in the survey."

That doesn't mean information management isn't important, even vital, to the future of your organization. It's just hard.

What are the challenges? "Funding is a good one," says Todd. Data quality is a big challenge as well, he says: "There are years and years of content out there." Also, how do you find the time to champion an enterprise-wide strategy when there are so many other, more immediate things to do? "CIOs are focused on so many different initiatives," says Todd. "You need the right executive sponsorship to make it happen."

Those words are key: make it happen. Advanced or not, the CIOs interviewed by Accenture intend to make enterprise information management happen.

After so many tears have been shed over integrating business and IT, "information is one of the first areas that straddles those two silos," Todd says. In that light, an information management strategy could help unite business and IT more seamlessly than past technology strategies, like ERP. And that sounds like the appropriate strategy for a 21st Century CIO.