Executives typically care about results and accountability for the following:
1 – Increasing revenues.
2 – Reducing costs.
3 – Reducing risk.
That’s it. And if that’s the case, it is through this triad that the WHY? of information governance must be understood if we’re going to make any progress in this area at all. Let’s take them in reverse order.
Reducing risk. This is perhaps the best understood WHY? of information governance. If you are in an industry in which there are either compliance or litigation concerns and costs (uhhh…let’s see…is there one in which these are not a concern?) then the only way to reduce this risk is to have defensible information management policies.
However, this is where the argument for information governance usually stops. Usually this leaves governance in the hands of people with “Information,” “Legal,” or “Records” in their title. In a tight economy in which competitive pressures are constantly rising, I fear that risk alone is a necessary but not sufficient reason to take information governance seriously. Forrester’s Alan Weintraub notes, “Good information governance isn’t just about risk, it’s about making the business more agile.”
Reduce costs. Left to their own devices, the “business” will view litigation, compliance, storage costs related to ever-increasing volumes of information as externalities. They will assume that “someone else” will pay for it, and continue to engage in a content and information consumption binge that will inevitably result in what IBM’s George Parapadakis calls “content obesity.” Per the Compliance, Governance, and Oversight Council, “90% of the data in the world was created in the last two years. We have reached a tipping point: the growth rate of information now far exceeds IT budgets and the processes for governing that information.”
The ONLY way to reduce these costs is by reducing the scale of information being saved. And the ONLY way to do this effectively is through information governance. And the ONLY way to scale information governance is by automating as much of it as possible.
Increasing revenues. Talk to any executive long enough and inevitably something like the following will come up: “We need to increase customer engagement as a pathway to capturing share and growing revenues.”
For many years, the content management industry has talked about “getting the right information to the right person at the right time to make the right decision.” Even though this rationale was overstated in the early era of content management systems, it is now at the heart of the business problem of customer engagement. Information overload and content chaos threaten to overwhelm our ability to understand and act on customer needs. It is through this prism that we need to consider information governance.
Content and information is the currency that flows through all of our core processes. Absent a strategy and framework for making its management an organizational priority, no one will be accountable for its success or failure. Per Gartner’s Deb Logan – “the root of all of our problems with information…is the fact that there is no accountability for information as such.”
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