Information Governance

Information Governance is, normally, recognized as the known set of good multi-disciplinary structures, policies, procedures, processes, and controls applied to more rigorously manage information contained on all records media; this is by which it professionally supports an organization's both immediate and future regulatory, legal, risk, environmental, informational, and operational requirements and goals.

Information governance (IG) is, therefore, the better specification of needed decision rights and an accountability structure to significantly encourage needed behavior in the valuation, creation, storage, use, archival retention, and deletion of information.  Such compiled knowledge necessarily includes the processes, roles, standards and metrics that do safeguard the effective and efficient use of information in permitting an organization to attain its desired goals.   IG should normally, moreover, be a requisite element in critically planning an enterprise's holistic information architecture in a synergistic fashion. 

What is called IG, furthermore, can beneficially so encompass important aspects of data governance, information technology governance, information security governance, and responsible information management.

It exists, as could be guessed, as a holistic approach to appropriately managing corporate information by implementing processes, roles, controls, and metrics that dedicatedly treat information as a valuable business resource/asset; and, IG is, thus, naturally allied to the concept of records and information resources management, which can then be implemented through Enterprise Content Management.

Organizations with good IG controls are more fully aware of the who, what, when, where, why, and how of their amassed and growing information (read: record) sources: Who has proper access to this information?  What is the exact nature of the information?  When was this information produced, managed, or processed?  Where, in fact, is the actual information stored?  Why is this information being kept?  How exactly is this information being stored and, if retained over time, safeguarded?

The important goal of a genuinely holistic IG approach is to make the information assets available to those who need it, while streamlining management, decreasing storage costs, and better guaranteeing compliance.  This, in turn, allows the organization to decrease the legal risks related to unmanaged or inconsistently managed information and be then more responsive to an often mutable marketplace.

To encourage IG Best Practices, there should be implemented enterprise-wide IG programs that engage key leadership (executive sponsorship) and information stakeholders, across the organization, to secure their valued input and assist in then preparing the organization for change.  Most successful programs, however, use an incremental approach and don't attempt absolute changes all at once. 

This is, thus, done through defining master information standards along with the appropriate policies, privileges, and responsibilities of information owners and users to ensure required levels of both quality and risk management.  Consequently, progressive institutions, either private or public, have instituted IG Boards for more correctly implementing and overseeing the cognate program and its policies.


Yours sincerely,
Joe


-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Medina [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 07, 2011 10:05 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Focus on Information Governance

> Link, Gary M. <[log in to unmask]> queried:

>...this press release does not do is define information governance. 
>From an RM perspective, would it be accurate to say that information 
>governance is the policy-level portion of an RM program?
>

As mentioned here before on the definition (or the opinion of "THE"
definition) of many topics, a fantastic gauge is the one provided by John Godfrey Saxe:  http://goo.gl/MYPM8 

If you ask 6 people for their definition of "Information Governance" you'll get 6 opinions, none of them will be exactly right or exactly wrong.  Each organization has to develop their own form of "Information Governance" to best suit their environment of regulation, compliance and business needs. 

It includes policy, but extends beyond that to practices and procedures and training is a critical component to effective governance. 

The EDRM mentioned in the PR piece is just that, a "reference model" and like MOREQ is a "model requirements" document or DOD5015.2 is a "design criteria document that establishes a minimum set of baseline functional requirements" that seeks to set a model for organizations to use to develop their OWN specific Information Governance strategy.

Larry
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