When an organization buys a new system, the evaluation team usually includes IT, finance, and the department that will use it. The person who understands the information the system will depend on is often missing.
When people hear “information management system,” they tend to picture records management, document management, or enterprise content management (ECM). AIIM defines the category much more broadly. Our Industry Watch research includes:
Some of these may surprise you. A website CMS or an AI agent might not look like an information management system at first. But any system that creates, stores, moves, or acts on unstructured or semi-structured data can benefit from oversight by an information professional. That covers most of the modern software stack.
Every system and process you buy will depend on data. You want someone on the team who understands that data. An information professional can:
These questions come up in every implementation. The only choice is whether you answer them at the start or in the middle.
I learned this firsthand years ago as CIO of a nonprofit. We had just kicked off a large middleware (iPaaS) project when the vendor started asking about our data catalog and wanted guidance on mapping. We realized we didn’t have anyone with that expertise on the project team.
We had to pause, add a member of our data analytics team, and bring them up to speed. That cost us time. How different would the project have been if they had been involved from the outset, including system selection?
AIIM has tracked purchasing authority among information professionals since 2024, and the shift over three years deserves attention.
In 2024, just over half of respondents sat on an evaluation team with no final say, and only 14% held real purchasing authority, sole or primary. By 2026, that figure is closer to 20%. Roughly one in five practitioners can now approve a purchase outright.
Figure 1.4. Involvement in IM software purchasing decisions (2024 n=359, 2025 n=286, 2026 n=470)
At the same time, the share of respondents with no involvement at all has grown to 15.5%. More practitioners are stepping into real decision-making roles, and more are being left out entirely. The middle ground of shared or light input is shrinking from both sides. Where your role sits on that line, and where it should sit, is worth asking directly.
I’m not advocating for more sole purchasing authority. Large investments are often best decided together. I am advocating for including information professionals in system selection, whether that means:
Information professionals understand the data these systems will depend on. Bring them in early, and you’ll avoid learning that lesson the way I did.
The purchasing data above comes from AIIM’s 2026 State of the Information Management Industry, Part 1: Work, Skills, and Identity of the Information Professional. The report looks at where information professionals sit, how they’re perceived, where they add value, and the skills they’ll need over the next five years. A few highlights:
Download your free copy of the report, and watch for Part 2: Technology and Data, coming in December 2026.