From a business perspective, information should be handled like property. Like assets or supplies, information needs management.
Companies set policies to govern use, storage, and disposal of assets and office supplies. Companies also need to make and enforce rules governing electronically stored information, including how it is organized (who has access and how), stored (where and at what cost), retained (including backups and archives), and destroyed (deletion and non-deletion both have significant legal and cost consequences). These policies must balance the business, legal and technical needs of the company. Without them, a company opens itself up to losses from missed opportunities, employee theft, lawsuits, and numerous other risks.
Some information is analogous to company ASSETS. For example, let’s suppose a certain sales proposal took someone a week to write and required approval and edits from four other people plus 6 hours of graphics production time. An accountant isn’t going to list that proposal on the company books. But it is an asset. It can be edited and resubmitted to other potential customers in a fraction of the time it took to create the original. Like the machinery, furniture, or hand tools used to operate a business, company money was spent obtaining this information and it will retain some value for some time. It should be managed like an asset.
Some information is analogous to OFFICE SUPPLIES. For example, a manager spends a number of hours customizing a laptop with email account settings, browser bookmarks and passwords, ribbon and plugin preferences, nested document folders, security settings, etc. That customization information is crucial for the manager’s productivity in much the same way as having pens in the drawer, paper in the printer, staples in the stapler, and water in the water-cooler can be important for productivity. Productivity will be lost if it is lost. That information needs to be managed just as much as office supplies need to be manged.
From a business perspective, when company information is lost or damaged, or when users are under or over supplied, it is no different from mismanagement of company assets and office supplies.
Setting an information policy means:
- identifying information use and control needs;
- making choices and tradeoffs about how to meet those needs; and
- taking responsibility for results and an ongoing process (setting goals / taking action / measuring progress / adjusting).
Information governance policy is an on-going process for managing valuable company information. All of the stakeholders – in particular, business units, IT, and Legal – must collaborate in order to draw a bullseye on company information management needs. The right people in the organization must be charged with responsibility for getting results or for making changes needed to get results.
Without a doubt, it takes time and money, and requires collaboration, to develop a “policy.” But we’re all accustomed to this type of preparation already. Let’s look at simple, familiar professional standards for just a moment:
- Software developers test software on actual users and correct bugs and (hopefully) mistaken assumptions before releasing it. Avoiding these steps will undoubtedly lead to loss and possibly bankruptcy.
- Attorneys meet with clients before going to trial to prepare both the client and the attorneys. If they don’t they risk losing their clients millions, or getting them locked up.
Advance preparation is as essential in information management as it is in software development and trial practice. Simply ignoring the issue, or dumping it on one person or a single department (like IT or Legal) can be very costly. Avoiding the planning component of information management is like putting in only 80% of the time and effort needed for the company to succeed. Avoiding 20% of the time and effort doesn’t yield a “savings” when the outcome is failure, as when an employee steals documents, essential information is lost when a building with no computer back-ups burns down, or old documents which would have been deleted under a proper information governance policy turn up in a lawsuit and cost millions.
Information policy does NOT flow from any of the following all-to-common realities:
- The first meeting between the Legal Department and the new eDiscovery vendor is also the first meeting between Legal and IT (true story);
- Ever since a certain person from the General Counsel’s office was made the head of corporate records management, no one in IT will talk to that person (true story);
- Thousands of backup tapes are preserved indefinitely – kept on “litigation hold” — because some of the information on some of the tapes must be preserved, and no one has worked out whether to save or delete the rest of the information (true story) (see also Sean Regan’s comments to the previous post https://bruce2b.com/2009/04/20/tape-indexing-breathes-life-into-tape-storage/#comment-11).
Information management technology alone, without a company-specific understanding of the problems that the technology is meant to solve, is not a recipe for success. A recent article by Carol Sliwa, published by SearchStorage.com (April 22, 2009), offers a detailed look at issues surrounding efforts to reduce storage costs by assessing how information is being used and moving it to the least expensive storage tier possible.
The article has some powerful suggestions on developing information policy. First, Karthik Kannan, vice president of marketing and business development at Kazeon Systems Inc.:
“What we discovered over time is that customers need to be able to take some action on the data, not just find it…. Nobody wants to do data classification just for the sake of it. It has to be coupled with a strong business reason.”
Then IDC‘s Noemi Greyzdorf:
“In order to really realize and get the benefit of data and storage classification, you have to start with a business process…. And it has to start from conversations with the business units and understanding the needs and requirements of the business. Only at the end, once you actually have everything in place, should you be looking at technology because then you’ll have a better set of requirements for that technology.”
It takes time, money and cooperation between departments that may have never worked together before to develop a working information governance policy. But that is not a reason to skip — or skimp on — the process. Companies need to protect their assets and productivity, and information governance has become an essential area for doing just that.
bruce2b 