Months in the making, we have finally reached the last entry in our epic, 3-part series mapping the retail best practices with a comprehensive Information Governance Program. (If you missed the first entries in the series, please take a look at the Introduction, then parts One and Two. Go ahead. We’ll wait.)
Having done the hard work of creating the centralized corporate policy, including applicable jurisdictional variances, and putting in place the infrastructure required to support it in the field, one might be persuaded that the rest of the program falls neatly into place as a matter of course. After all, that’s hard work, those first two phases. It involves a lot of people, including executives at the highest levels of the organization. Doesn’t the inertia generated by the sheer mass of the effort pull the project across the finish line?
Indeed, that was one of my takeaways from last month’s MER Conference… there was little to no discussion about what to do after you have defined and rolled out your RM / IG policy. Instead, session after session focused on how hard it is to get to that point in the first place. MER attendees left well-versed on the complexities of defining and enforcing retention schedules, and how difficult it is to overcome these using traditional RM approaches. There was no information on what to do next, or even why to go about this sort of thing in the first place. I would argue that the next step in this process is the most crucial, yet most neglected phase of the program: making content available to the people who require it.
Why Go To The Store?
As we’ve done in the previous entries in this series, let’s first consider the question from the retail point of view. The whole point in going through the heavy lifting of creating useful and easily navigable store layouts and then rendering those models into physical locations was to make it possible for customers to find what they want and purchase it. Consider the customer expectations… First and foremost, they expect to be able to find what they are looking for without needing help. This means the environment should be logically organized from THEIR perspective. They expect a safe, clean, and, better yet, visually appealing environment. They expect appropriate enforcements to be in place to ensure safety, collect taxes, and enforce age restrictions on the purchase of governed content such as firearms and prescription drugs. Finally, they expect the products they find to be of good quality, at a fair price.
There are some secondary audiences to be accommodated… company representatives will periodically visit the store to do inventories and ensure compliance with corporate standards. Government inspectors may also visit from time-to-time to ensure compliance with health and safety laws.
Each of these constituencies will have a satisfactory experience if the retailer has been sufficiently diligent in the earlier phases of the project. Successful retailers understand this. Those who fail to deliver on their customers’ expectations soon find themselves out of business.
The Expectations of the Information Governance Consumer
Who is the Information Governance Consumer? Say it with me, now: “EVERYONE!” (Don’t forget this; it will be important later.) The entire company is responsible for, and benefits from, good Information Governance practices. Having narrowed the target audience down thusly, let’s talk about what the Information Governance Consumer’s expectations should be.
In short, they should have the same expectations as a retail customer. They should be able to quickly and easily find the information they need (assuming they have the appropriate rights to it). They expect to have this access without having to go too far out of the way for it… that is, it should be available within the context of their day to day business activities. They expect the information to be relevant, high-quality, and specific to their needs. They should also expect that appropriate lifecycle actions are performed on the information as required by law, industry best practices, or internal standards and guidelines. If something is supposed to be moved or deleted, it should be.
Unfortunately, the Information Governance Consumer is usually frustrated. Too often, they:
- Cannot quickly and easily find the information they need, whether they have access to it or not.
- Use search engines hopelessly clogged with irrelevant or out-of-date entries.
- Have to go well out of their way to get the information they need.
- Must sift through rows and rows of records to find something relevant to the task at hand.
We have failed to meet the needs of the Information Governance Consumer. (And who, again, is the Information Governance Consumer? That’s right, everyone.)
Where Did We Drop The Ball?
The cause of these difficulties is simply identified, but difficult to address. Let’s review.
- Define a central policy for managing corporate information, including jurisdictional variances as needed.
- Create an infrastructure for managing that information in the field in accordance with the policy.
- Deliver this governed content to the consumers who require it.
The failure occurs in step 3. The traditional Records Management approach abdicates this responsibility, and lays it at the feet of technology vendors to provide access to the content in their repositories. This means that business users, auditors, corporate counsel, and others who need access to the information must do so in a repository-specific manner. In practice, this means two things: first, they need to know where the information is; second, given the where, they need to know how to get it.
Would we do this to a retail customer? Would we organize an entire store according to brand?
“All the Nike stuff goes in this section… shoes, golf clubs, and apparel. All the Yamaha stuff goes over there, motorcycles, boat engines, and pianos.”
Or worse, by delivery mechanism (distributor)?
“Take everything off the next truck that arrives, and dump it in that corner. The customers will figure out what they want.”
If we set up a store with this mindset, customers would visit once and leave in frustration, never to return. We’d be out of business immediately. And yet, this is exactly what we expect out of our Information Governance Consumer.
The solution, of course, is to replicate the model proven by our friends in the retail industry. Remove the technology component from information access. Replace it with a repository agnostic search capability that can be easily embedded within the context of existing line-of-business applications, GUI’s, and / or portals. Business Consumers, such as customer service or field sales representatives, will never again have to consider which repository to search when looking for a given record. Legal counsel would not need a separate E-Discovery Tool, nor repository / platform specific means for searching through content and placing a litigation hold on potentially relevant records. Compliance and audit teams can use the same platform to ensure that information is being managed in accordance with standard laws and regulations. Lifecycle actions, such as disposition, removal of personally identifiable information, and transfers between repositories or storage tiers, can be tied to automated events generated by external systems, and automatically enforced. In this way, the beneficiaries of a comprehensive Information Governance program are actually ahead of their retail peers. They’d love to be able to automatically dispose of expired food and medication sitting on their shelves.
To many of you, this state may seem implausible, an ideal state to be realized well in the future. ”How can I be sure my file plan is an accurate reflection of my policy? How can I account for the jurisdictional variances in relevant laws and regulations? How can I automatically enforce lifecycle actions across my repositories, while providing secure, fast, and simple access to information?”
This is exactly the value proposition behind RSD GLASS, our patent-pending Information Governance Platform. It’s a unique, revolutionary approach. Our customers are realizing these benefits today.
Want to learn more? We did a webinar last week on this very topic. Or, just give us a holler.