Our firm’s elephant icon is a nod to The Blind M
en and the Elephant, the familiar, age-old parable for how we often do not see the big picture, but instead only the parts we directly encounter. And so it goes for organizations’ data. Individual company functions and departments often have their own, limited perspectives on information, seeing only the risks and opportunities with which they are directly familiar. Limited perspective yields limited perception – not a good thing for identifying, understanding, and controlling organizational risk.
I actually prefer a slightly different version, The Blind Elephants and the Man:
One day, six blind elephants were in a heated argument about what Man was like. To resolve their dispute, they sought out and found a man. The first elephant “felt” the man and then proclaimed “Man is flat.” Each of the other elephants, in turn, felt the man, and they all agreed.
The moral? Limited perspective not only yields limited perception – it can also lead to very bad results.
“Information Governance” has become an overused buzz-phrase, often trotted out as marketing mumbo-jumbo for selling technology tools. In all the hype one can easily lose track of what it really means. At its heart, Information Governance is no more – and no less – than making sure the organization sees the big picture of information compliance, cost, risk, and opportunity when making strategic decisions.
The Information Governance perspective is a ready-made, scalable resource. Any organization can make meaningful headway, right away, by simply adopting an inclusive IG perspective when addressing information matters, before investing in significant organizational changes and expensive technology tools.
What does this mean? Simply this – whenever any information-related issue is dealt with or decision will be made by your organization, be sure to ask the following:
Continue Reading Why govern our information? Reason #2: Your information risks and opportunities arise from a single source – your data. Your response strategies should be synchronized too.
As you toss and turn in bed, you picture yourself on a strange playing field with other athletes swirling around you. You have absolutely no idea what sport you are playing, nor a clue what the rules are. It all feels beyond embarrassing, and downright dangerous.
If you’re old enough, you’ll remember a time when businesses actually kept their own information (cue my adult children to roll their eyes). How quaint. We no longer keep most of our information – providers do that for us. We store our data in the cloud, with cloud providers. We outsource business applications to SaaS providers, and even entire systems as PaaS. And we increasingly use service providers to handle key aspects of our business that we used operate internally, resulting in a robust flow of data out of our businesses to such providers, and also the providers generating, receiving, and retaining huge troves of business data on our behalf.
bage in, garbage out” – we know that already, right? Well … what we know about information quality and what we do are not always in sync. Just for kicks, consider information quality through the lens of the industrial quality movement.
As the information tide relentlessly rises, many organizations simply see an IT problem, to be fixed with a purely IT solution – more storage capacity, more tools, or both. But merely adding more storage is a reaction, not a strategy. And adding technology tools without the right governance rules invariably makes things worse, not better.
The “business case” for information governance often focuses solely on quantifying specific costs for data management and exposures for 
Dr. Stephen Covey reminded us that “important” is not the same thing as “urgent.” Records retention reminds us that important is not the same thing as exciting. I get it – records retention schedules are boring. But the fact remains that literally thousands of records retention requirements apply to your organization’s information. I know, because my firm finds and tracks these laws as part of our decades of retention schedule work for clients across industries. And your regulators expect you to know them too.
“If your clients don’t have a records management system, they may as well take their money out into the parking lot and set it on fire.”
How time flies. Seventeen years ago, I went to work for a small, visionary company based in Seattle—Computer Forensics, Inc. Indeed, the founder was so early in the e-discovery and forensics industry that our URL was forensics.com. Laptop drives typically had 8 GB of storage, and servers were more often than not simply a bigger box that sat in a closet.