Implementing an Information Governance Solution

Dear Customer,

 

Thank you very much for the recent purchase order for our information governance solution. You should be receiving the software CD in the next couple of days. Please insert the CD and after you run D:\setup, point to the applications that have the highest risk. It’s that simple. If you run into issues, access our online help system. Thank you again for your business and good luck.

 

Sincerely,

Your information governance vendor

 

I wish it was that simple and so do you. In reality, implementing an information governance solution requires more than software and running D:\setup.exe. Your company must document and validate (with executive management) the goals of an information governance program. Management needs to understand where in the company is the biggest risk. Is it in a particular line of business? Is it within a specific jurisdiction? Is it across a set of user groups (i.e. sales, finance, manufacturing)? Select a few areas and determine requirements, timelines, and budget constraints. Wait that’s right, you don’t have any budget constraints.

Step One – Create Information Governance Policy

One of challenges companies are grappling with is capturing all the requirements mandated by applicable laws and mapping them to corporate information and the various business applications and processes. Companies must hold cross functional meetings (stakeholders from legal, IT, business, compliance, and risk) to begin defining information governance policies. As I've stated before, information governance policies have some similarities to records management policies but also have lots of unique attributes. In addition to retention/disposition, information governance policies also include data privacy rules, eDiscovery requirements, metadata management, laws and regulations, as well as storage migration rules. This allows you to get “executive alignment” for managing the entire lifecycle of the record.

Once the policies are defined and validated, it’s time to publish the details to everyone in the organization. This should be published in PDF or HTML as well as an electronic format which can integrate with business applications across jurisdictions. By centralizing the definition of information governance policies, you reduce business risk while lowering your overall policy administration costs.

Stay tuned for step two.

 

Photo is courtesy of somegeekintn/Casey Fleser from Flickr

Comments

[oil mill]

First I want to thank you for describing about the categories of information governance. For Keeping records of information it is mandatory to have a policy and every body should follow that. Another thing is that inspite of keeping the records in a managed form, it is also considerable that how fast we are able to retrieve the stored information..