Information Governance

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Donald Trump speaks during introduction Governor Mike Pence as running for vice president at Hilton hotel Midtown ManhattanIt’s certainly been a wild, heated presidential race.  Information governance has remained at center stage, ever since President Obama’s successful 2008 rallying cry, “Data We Can Believe In.”  And the 2016 candidates have followed suit, with Bernie Sanders’ “What We Need is an Information Revolution,” Hilary Clinton’s “Information for America,” and Jeb Bush’s succinct slogan: “Data!”

But no candidate has tapped into the electorate’s visceral hopes and fears for information governance with more gusto than Donald Trump.  As election day nears, it’s time to take a closer look at Mr. Trump’s positions on managing information compliance, cost, risk, and value.

I’m calling for a total and complete shutdown of data entering our computer systems, until our IT representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.

Continue Reading The politics of information governance

KindergartenSometimes we make things way too complicated – especially our relationship with business data. Allow me to “kidnap” Robert Fulghum’s classic poem – wisdom in effectively governing information compliance, cost, risk, and value is not found exclusively at the top of the data science mountain, but there in the sandpile at kindergarten.  Here are the things we learned there:
Continue Reading All we really need to know about Information Governance we learned in kindergarten

Hammer ponding computer keyboardPoor data. Though more essential to business than ever before,  data is simultaneously frustrating for its inaccessibility, intimidating in its volume and complexity, distrusted for its unreliability, maligned for its management costs, and feared for its litigation, privacy, and security risks.

But let’s not cast business data as the culprit. Data is basically inert.  It sits where we store it, goes where we send it, does what we (or some system programmer) tell it to do, and is as secure as the safeguards we provide.  Data is not the “actor” – good, bad, or indifferent.  We are.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we can see that most every problem we experience with business data has its root in what people do, or fail to do, as individuals, work teams, or organizations:Continue Reading People don’t have data problems ….