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Implementing ERM functionality in SharePoint and other solutions is not simply installing the computer platform or system.  Records management instruments and discipline, and Information Governance, are required. 

Information Governance is concerned with defining accountability for an organization’s information assets.  If Governance is implemented properly – that is, if the there is GOOD governance - the organization’s information management should be compliant with any relevant legislation or regulations.

And it should be a sound basis for exploiting information, using it for your organizational’s gains, and delivering office productivity benefits.

Your organization should be able to exploit new ways of working more effectively, such as changes in information access channels and office automation, or new business or service delivery models.   (For example, where citizens drive the interaction with government).

Good governance will also help to address all the interfaces between the customer, your organization and other providers.  For example, imagine you are a broker of services between a number of providers and the end customers.  You must be able to coordinate service delivery, possibly from a number of partners and providers, to achieve a seamless range of services from your customers’ perspective.

Lastly, and, importantly, information governance provides a way of ensuring that good information management practices can be sustained over long periods of time.  For example, ensuring that procedures, and other Records Management Instruments, are maintained as the business requirements around them evolve and change.

So, basically, good governance boils down, pretty much, to being a fashionable term for good management – and information governance is, therefore, looking after information properly.

With ERM systems and SharePoint, we are fortunate to have computer tools and configuration/customization of components, to enable organizations to do just that.  Many of the governance controls can be built into processes and the technology so that the users are hardly aware of these activities as they carry out their new ways of working.

Tell us about your success in building controls into your processes and ERM systems.

What approaches did you find to work well and which others did you find you needed to change?

I will be speaking at the following events:

·        March 19^th – 23^rd, 2012 AIIM Conference in San Francisco, CA