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Our firm’s elephant icon is a nod to The Blind Men 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.

Fried egg on the sidewalk
“This is your information, ungoverned.”

2017 was rife with data dangers.  Nary a day passed without headlines of massive data breaches and ransomware attacks; Russian election-meddling through WikiLeaks and social media; fake news; and presidential tweet-storms.  Disruptive information-driven technologies continued to emerge, from block-chain to biometrics, IoT, AI, and robotics.  Meanwhile, the sheer volume of our personal and business data inexorably grew.

What better way to start 2018 than with a renewed commitment to Information Governance?  So, here are a dozen reasons why your organization should govern its information, in 2018 and beyond: 
Continue Reading 12 reasons to govern your information in 2018

Bean of Chicago Millennium Park, Illinois, USAIt happens every day.  A company spends a huge amount of money on a new technology system, without fully addressing the information implications.  Maybe the decision (to move on-premise operations to a cloud SaaS or PaaS, or to retire and replace an enterprise database, or buy a comprehensive new tool suite) was reactive, driven by an impending crisis.  Maybe the decision-making was siloed, with IT not clearly hearing what the rest of the business truly needs (or more likely, the rest of the business not speaking up).  Or maybe IT just responded literally to a business directive of the moment (let’s get into IoT, or Big Data, or Blockchain!).  Regardless, the green light is lit, the dollars are spent … and problems ensue, painfully multiplying the procurement’s all-in cost.

What was missing? Strategic consideration of repercussions for information compliance, risk, and value for the organization as a whole, including privacy, data security, retention/destruction, litigation discovery, intellectual property, and so forth.  In other words, Information Governance.  And when was it missing?  Before the decision was made and the dollars were spent.

So, what if something could be hard-wired into the procurement process, a trigger that timely prompted decision-makers to call time-out; get focused input from all stakeholders; assess the repercussions for information compliance, risk, and value; and align the procurement requirements and purchase decisions with organizational strategy for governing information?Continue Reading X Percent for Information Governance

Chained wallet. Conception of blockchain, finance security and protection

I had been thinking about writing a post on Blockchain when I happened across the Washington Post’s In/Out List for 2017, and that sealed the deal:

Out:  Not being able to explain Bitcoin.

In:     Not being able to explain Blockchain.

So, feeling up to the challenge, here goes.

Blockchain is really just a distributed, shared database technology. Its use demands that multiple, untrusted entities (such as different companies in a supply chain) write transactions to multiple, duplicate copies of the database that propagate through peer-to-peer protocols.  Each node (or copy) of the database verifies the transaction independently by requiring the transaction to be confirmed in a blockchain.  The blockchain is chronological, and the database can only be changed when there is consensus among the participants.  Most important for the discussion here, however, is that the transactions and the distributed database are claimed to be immutable and permanent.  And that’s a real problem for information governance.Continue Reading Blockchain – “Shiny Object Syndrome”?