I spoke to a few groups last
week, from small to large, on the west and east coast. Each group was a
key target audience for information governance (IG) education, products,
and services and each time I asked if anyone in the audience had a
clear, one sentence definition of IG -- no one volunteered.
So I
asked those in one of the smaller groups to anonymously write down their
definition of IG on a piece of scratch paper. I read them aloud and a
few were pretty good but what struck me is that in a room of 25, there
were 25 definitions of IG.
That's not good for business, IG players!
How did the definition of IG get so fuzzy, so unclear? There are a few reasons:
1) Trade organizations co-opted IG
- and slanted the definition of IG to fit their existing community. In
the records management (RM) field, IG became nearly synonymous with RM.
Many records managers brushed off IG as something they had been doing
for years. In fact, the scope of IG duties is much greater. In the legal
community, IG became synonymous with e-discovery, so much so that if
you read articles published in legal journals you will find the terms
used almost interchangeably. And e-discovery conferences and retreats
latched on to the hot IG moniker and added it without changing or
expanding their content to include true IG;
2) Records management & e-discovery software companies co-opted IG -
virtually overnight records management software and e-discovery
software became re-branded with the new fancier, more popular IG tag. If
you walked along the aisles of any major RM or legal technology show
you could see the change in signage in the last couple of years although
no real change was made to the software;
3) Major analyst firms mangled the definition of IG - further confusing the market. Here is an example, Gartner's definition, which is so verbose it becomes obtuse:
"Gartner defines information governance
as the specification of decision rights and an accountability framework
to ensure appropriate behavior in the valuation, creation, storage,
use, archiving and deletion of information. It includes the processes,
roles and policies, standards and metrics that ensure the effective and
efficient use of information in enabling an organization to achieve its
goals."
I think most people would agree the above definition is foggy. Not an elevator pitch.
4) Major media outlets and analyst firms continue to confuse data governance with IG - data
governance (DG) involves data quality and ensuring you have clean,
unique (not duplicated) data in your databases so that downstream
reports and analyses are accurate. IG is about managing not only that
roughly 10% of information that organizations must manage which is
structured (databases), but also that 90% which is unstructured (or
semi-structured), including email, word processing documents, PDFs,
presentations, and the like. This 'expert' at a major consultancy has apparently conflated IG with DG;
5) Books confused IG with DG
- some authors decided to do a quick 'search and replace' to make their
data governance book about the hot new topic of IG. Just search books
for "information governance" on Amazon.com or similar sites. You will
find books published by a major vendor with a DG agenda. Take a look at
the Table of Contents and you'll see;
So how do we get it right? How do we get to a clear definition of IG?
Here is a solid definition from the IG Initiative:
"Information
governance is the activities and technologies that organizations employ
to maximize the value of their information while minimizing associated
risks and costs."
To distill it down further, minimizing
risks has to do with information security and control; control of
information helps reduce potential breaches but also reduces redundant,
outdated or trivial (ROT) information, and therefore costs; and
optimizing information means leveraging it to gain new value while
keeping costs minimized.
So we can come to a succinct definition, that IG is:
"Security, control, & optimization of information."
This is a definition people can remember. Let's break it down a little.
This definition means that information is secure in its three states: at rest, in transit, and in use. It means that your organizational IG processes control who has access to which information, and when. And
it means that garbage information is destroyed and the most valuable
information is leveraged to provide new insights and value. In other
words, it is optimized.
I'd love to continue the dialogue and debate. Feel free to reach out and connect here, by email, or on Twitter.
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Robert Smallwood is an author, educator, speaker, and consultant. He is Managing Director of the Institute for IG at IMERGE Consulting, at www.IGTraining.com.
He teaches comprehensive courses on IG and E-records management for
corporate and public sector clients. He is the author of 3 leading books
on Information Governance: Information Governance: Concepts, Strategies. and Best Practices (Wiley, 2014); Managing Electronic Records: Methods, Best Practices, and Technologies (Wiley, 2013); and Safeguarding Critical E-Documents (Wiley, 2012).
Follow Robert on Twitter @RobertSmallwood and if we are not connected - please feel free to reach out!