Critical Path for a Successful Governance Strategy
Information is undoubtedly the most valuable asset for any organization today. Employees deal with different types and genres of information in their daily work.
Almost every organization has information overload as the data continues to increase. To stay on top, and to correctly use this information, organizations need to set up a proper content and information governance strategy.
An information governance strategy evaluates the entire ecosystem of an organization to determine the right tools, processes and knowledge required. In most cases, business activities and processes are driven by data. Organizations need to think about how they want to position their data and what kind of insights they want to derive from it. This is done by simply evaluating the information lifecyle. Answering questions such as how much data is produced, where is this data coming from and what is needed from this data and when is the key.
The information lifecycle initiates from the creation and ends with the retention or disposition. However, governing and extracting value from information has become a challenge as many organizations are left with a sprawl of unconnected platforms.
The Need for a Functional Information Governance Strategy
Considering the importance of having a well-designed information governance strategy, our information management consultants at Intalio establish a deeper level of expertise for our clients by sharing our valuable knowledge and best practices in the related subject.
Our consultancy services help organizations build a durable strategy that guides a company to keep its information management practices in sync, improve its processes, and prepare for the future.
The right information at the right time is the key to innovation, process efficiency and service excellence. Without a thorough information governance strategy, you will not be able to support the work of your organization.
Read on as we lead you to the path on setting the right strategy to support the work of your organization. In addition to the various areas your organization must assess before deciding to implement a content services solution and the approach it should follow when doing this exercise.
In order to execute the right information governance strategy, the following key areas need to be assessed, analyzed and documented:
1) Organization Environment –
Assessing the current state of the organization by getting a solid understanding of the organizations size, structure, projects, communication protocols, procedures and so on is the first milestone…
Our experts at EverteamGS-Intalio, address the challenges across the organization, while assessing your needs, and analyzing the underlying processes and behaviors. We answer questions like how does your organization function exactly? How does the work actually get done? Who reports to whom? How does the information flow within the organization? How are the decisions made?
2) Deep Dive Into the Organization’s Current State –
Here, we go deeper in the information produced, used and nurtured all along the organization’s work cycle. This information is incredibly valuable as it will help to form the business vision, which will begin to shape what the future state will look like once the program is implemented. Two different aspects are talked at this stage:
Information governance is an organization’s technologies, policies, processes, and strategies employed to optimize information in order to meet its business needs, as well as legal and industry regulations, while minimizing risks. It consists of determining and defining the below key components:
1) Records Management:
- The identification, classification, retention, use and eventual disposition of records and information.
2) Content Management:
- The storage and access of electronic records and information.
• Security, access controls, retention and disposition, and legal holds for electronic information.
3) Data Governance:
- The level of Data integrity: processes and controls are in place to ensure data is true, accurate and unique.
• Data cleansing to remove corrupted, inaccurate or extraneous data and deduplication to eliminate redundant data.
• Master Data Management (MDM) to ensure reports, analyses and conclusions are based on clean, reliable, trusted data.
4) Information Security:
- Controlling access to information and maintaining the security of confidential information and communications.
• Digital Signatures, Document Encryption, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Information Rights Management (IRM).
5) Data Privacy:
- The identification and protection of any information that can identify an individual, such as name, medical record number, credit card number, etc…
6) Risk Management:
- The identification, assessment and prioritization of organizational risks.
7) Knowledge Management:
- Create, share, use and manage the knowledge and information held by an enterprise in order to make the optimum use of that knowledge.
8) Litigation Readiness:
- Key legal processes include electronic discovery (e-discovery) readiness, records and information retention policies, legal hold notification, and legally defensible disposition practices.
9) Regulatory Compliance:
- Ensure the organization is conforming to relevant laws, regulations and internal policies.
Information lifecycle management consists on the acquisition of information from various sources, its custodianship, distribution and disposition through deletion or archiving as dictated by the organization’s information governance policies.
Information lifecycle management includes the following guidelines:
3) Challenges and Struggles
As we do believe that challenges faced in a workplace can be best described by the digital workers dealing with the information on daily basis, this phase is dedicated to hear their feedback, by arranging several workshops with all departments to understand the real struggles faced in their business as usual work. The main objective of this exercise would be to get a testimony from the employees deeply involved in the creation, management and usage of the information in the organization, to understand the challenges and difficulties they face throughout their day to day tasks.
4) Gap Analysis and Measure Success
Gap refers to the space between ‘where your organization stands’ (the present state) and ‘where you would like your organization to be’ (the target state). A gap analysis is a method of assessing the differences in performance to determine whether business requirements are being met and, if not, what steps should be taken to ensure they are met successfully. The objective is to remove the gap between the current performance and the available potential in order to reach the ideal situation.
Develop a Roadmap for your Governance Strategy –
Once done with the critical success factors by looking into each of the key components, we need to make them specific to the objectives we are trying to achieve by implementing a data governance program specific to your organizations needs and goals.
We will then be able to take a decision in creating the correct information management and governance strategy. By building this program roadmap, we will be setting the goals and significant milestones for the enhancement and improvement of the information governance within the organization. We can finally optimize the tools and embed the digital characteristics in the organization’s work to help facilitate your information governance and support your organization.
Have a one-to-one chat with our experts today to assist you in implementing the right content governance strategy for your organization.
