What Will Information Governance Do For Your Business?

What’s the need?

Over the next decade, the amount of data worldwide will multiply by 44 times.  However, the volume of unstructured information will actually grow percent faster than structured data. Between 2000 and 2010, organizations more than doubled the amount they spent on storage-related software even though the cost of raw hard drive space dropped by almost 100 times. The volume and variety of information in all forms requiring retention and management are also increasing dramatically.

In fact, 90 percent of unstructured information will require formal governance and management by 2020.  The problem of information governance is growing faster than the problem of information growth itself. If these projections aren’t staggering enough for the use of Information Governance, consider this:

The US Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 created several new agencies and nearly 400 rule making requirements, hundreds of which are still moving through the approval process. Embedded within these hundreds of regulations are new, complex recordkeeping requirements for a variety of financial institutions active in the US financial markets, including those dealing in swaps and CDO’s.  The US Food and Drug Administration in 2013 promulgated over 1,200 pages of new regulations for organizations that are part of the complex, global food supply, by implementing the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The FSMA has been described as the “most sweeping reform of food safety laws in more than 70 years.”  Once again, these complex new rules include several new record keeping requirements that affect companies across the globe.

Organizations typically experience 10 percent annual growth in the volume of stored paper records. Moreover, at least 30 percent of these records are often retained well past their mandatory retention periods and sometimes indefinitely, even though most are duplicates of an electronic record. This is driven by preservation requirements related to litigation or investigations and immature information governance practices.

Organizations can face both civil and criminal penalties for even inadvertent destruction or mismanagement of records as part of litigation and investigations. For example, there have been several cases where backup tapes containing information potentially relevant to a lawsuit were recycled and overwritten as part of normal operations.

Organizations struggle to align paper and electronic records retention practices. In fact, many organizations continue to maintain retention schedules that were designed for a different era. These schedules, with hundreds or even thousands of retention categories and event-based retention periods, are extremely difficult to implement and are largely irrelevant for today’s digital business environment.

When litigation, investigations, audits, or other formal proceedings involving the collection of evidence commence, organizations must suspend normal records destruction practices and begin to preserve all information relevant to the matter. This “discovery” process can result in the preservation of massive volumes of content sometimes for decades.  Over half of organizations in a recent survey said they were preserving information that was over 20 years old, and nearly a quarter were keeping forty-year-old paper and other records.

Creating A Flexible Model

Organizations have little hope of complying with these rules or realizing the business benefit from their own information without formal information governance and records management programs. Creating a modern, efficient, and, flexible IG infrastructure will prevent your organization from becoming irrelevant.  Your organization must:

• Better manage your historical and inactive data
• Address your organization’s bloated data problem
• Govern structured data in line with internal and external regulations
• Lower IT spend by managing a smaller data footprint and retiring outdated applications 

By implementing The 7 Pillars of Information Governance, you’ll ensure your organization becomes industry compliant while reducing costs and improving efficiencies. As a conceptual blueprint to guide IG program directives towards its mission and objectives.  It also defines the key stakeholders that the organization intends to inform on industry best practices and trends.  However, value in the program only sustains itself through consistent support, employee training, monitoring and auditing. The 7 Pillars of Information Governance leading towards a compliant program are:

• Policies and Procedures
• Organizational Roles and Responsibilities
• Operational Best Practices
• Litigation Support
• Information Technology Support
• Training, Communication, Marketing
• Monitoring, Auditing, Support and Compliance

Gain Business Value

As Special Counsel Information Governance, we help you and your firm connect with top quality candidates in the records, information management and governance, and library science and research fields on a project, temporary, temp-to-perm or permanent basis.

Our Consulting Services helps organizations gain business value from information resources by conducting assessments, providing recommendations and implementing appropriate controls to improve the integrity and security of critical business data.