Information Governance – Just Do It

Information Governance (IG) is becoming a more familiar term around the company water cooler, but it doesn’t seem be discussed very much anywhere else in the corporate landscape. With the recent high profile data breeches, escalating e-discovery costs, and sanctions (in the U.S.) over poor legal holds, along with ever expanding digital volumes, why isn’t IG front and centre in the organization’s priorities?

There are a number of reasons why IG is difficult to get excited about:

• It is a program that encompasses many different departments and corporate initiatives, including legal, security, IT, and records management. Trying to find consensus and budget funds between all of these somewhat competing groups is difficult, if not impossible.
• There is no easy solution, such as purchasing a software package or piece of hardware, to solve the IG issues faced by the organization.
• IG’s benefits are not easy to quantify, making it difficult to obtain sufficient budget funds to implement it.
• The IG stakeholders with the greatest ability to bring all necessary parties together and allocate funds are usually the ones with the least interest or knowledge of IG.

​So what’s a poor organization to do? Clearly, it’s necessary to get C-suite buy-in and figure out what incentive will entice each stakeholder. A plan that implements IG over time using small incremental changes is likely to achieve more than trying to ram IG down the corporate throat.