Information Governance

Why Should We Get Out of Email?

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Moses from History of the World Part 1Last week I had the privilege of having dinner with a brilliant gentleman from my college days, Alex. Some may know of Alex as he the person who is responsible for my moniker, “Pie.” We had a great conversation that was mostly devoid of ‘remember when’ threads.

Alex is an independent lawyer in a city in the southern US. He has been practicing for quite some time and after delving into what I do for a living, he went into a rant on legal discovery, both paper and electronic.

He flat out accused many law firms of making large discovery requests in order to make money reviewing the results. Regardless of the outcome of the case, the billable hours accrued can turn a tidy profit for a law firm. He even shared a story of one case when the amount of discovery turned out to be very small and the firm dropped the case as they wouldn’t be able to make money from it.

While not all firms are like that, it does trigger certain behaviors and advice that in the grand scheme should not occur. We should be working to do what is right for our organization without being scared of ‘what if’ scenarios.

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Box Just Threw Down the Gauntlet

Clint Eastwood as Dirty HarryLast week, Box held their annual conference. Many announcements were expected and the announcement of Workflow coming to Box in 2015 was quite exciting. If you want a high-level look at everything that happened, check out Chris Walker’s quick thoughts on BoxWorks.

None of that is why I am writing this post.

Buried in the wave of tweets were two game-changing announcements. Box announced Retention Management and Auto-Classification of Content.

That’s right. Information Governance behind the scenes on an application that people actually use AND a way to get content in the right retention bucket without people having to intervene.

All in the cloud.

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Executing on Information Governance

I had the pleasure of attending the Information Governance Exchange in Washington, DC last week. It was a different conference from many that I have attended in the past. Attended by senior people that own Information Governance at their organizations, there were a lot of discussions about how to execute strategies to making Information Governance work.

This was not theory, it was hard advice and grounded discussions. In fact, it was the most BS free Information Governance event I had ever attended.

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Keep Your Data in Shape

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Congratulations! You are finally tracking the effectiveness of your content and are starting to gain real insights into how people interact with you on your website, social media outlets, and across all of your digital efforts. The data is really starting to pour in, revealing trends that are helping you plan for the next step of your evolving marketing strategy.

As the data piles up, you may start to notice little things. Reports are taking longer to run. Your IT staff is spending more time on performance tuning. You realize that determining the ideal audience for a campaign is requiring as many exclusions as inclusions. Meanwhile, your email bounce-back rate and unsubscribe requests continue to climb.

What is happening is info-glut. Over time, the data piles up and a growing percentage becomes inaccurate, unreliable, or both. While a simple answer is to throw a little more power at the problem and adjust expectations, there are questions that are begging to be asked.

  • Do we care who downloaded a whitepaper three years ago?
  • Is it still relevant that someone visited the site actively nine months ago and then disappeared?
  • How accurate is all that personal information that has been collecting since tracking was started?
  • When you move to a new system, how much of the data do you transform and bring over?

This is where a little Information Governance can streamline your activities from the beginning. Like you would when applying the Principles of Holistic Information Governance to content, you need to assess the data, determine its useful life, and plan accordingly.

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The Two Sides of Information Governance

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Sometimes things just fall together. This past weekend, I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark with my sons, reveling as they experienced all the quirks for the first time.

Then on Monday, I had a conversation about Information Governance with a fellow practitioner. They remarked that there were two pillars of Information Governance. At first I agreed, Value (Information Management) and Risk (Records Management/eDiscovery) are the two dynamics at play in Information Governance.

I then realized that they were really two sides of the same coin. They are not as separate as two pillars might be. They are intertwined. After a little thought, I decided that the headpiece to the Staff of Ra from the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark was actually the perfect paradigm.

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The IGI Tackles Information Governance for All

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The Two Bobs, Office SpaceThe Information Governance Initiative (IGI) released their 2014 Annual Report this week. I was actually sent a preview copy, but I was at the beach and it took me a while to get to reading the entire report. I could have readily written a simple write-up based upon the great executive summary, but I wanted to dig deeper.

I am glad that I did. It is easy to argue with the conclusions but without reading the facts behind them, it is wasted effort. That is one thing that I really like about the report, there was real thought into what the results of their surveys and conversations meant. That is something that you don’t see in many of these reports.

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Joining the Practitioners at the Information Governance Conference

The Information Governance Conference LogoLast week I talked about my upcoming visit to the Information Governance Exchange, which is an event filled with business owners and decision makers. The next week in September, the 8th through the 10th, I will be winging my way up to Hartford, CT for the Information Governance Conference (InfoGovCon).

The InfoGovCon will be filled with practitioners participating in an agenda filled with different perspectives on Information Governance from multiple industries. There are also training sessions from ARMA, the Information Governance Initiative, and many others.

While there, I am presenting on Removing the “Work” from Information Governance. Sounds interesting but what does that mean?

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Heading to the Information Governance Exchange

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Recently I’ve begun filling my Fall conference calendar. I always enjoy attending conferences because it is a great way to test my ideas and to hear new ones. The best conferences leave me with fresh perspectives and concepts that I want to try out immediately.

I always enjoy returning to some conferences, like AIIM and Monktoberfest, because I know that I will get value from my fellow attendees. New conferences are different experience. They provide an opportunity to meet and interact with a new community. The first week of September, I am trying one such conference located here in Washington, DC, the Information Governance Exchange.

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Information Governance and eDiscovery

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Back in May, Julia Colgan wrote a great post breaking down the latest version of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM). She outlined the changes in her post but the most significant change is the use of Information Governance instead of Information Management.

Version 3 of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model

Before I dive into the model, I want to make one thing clear. The purpose of this model is to show how all these concepts work together for the purpose of eDiscovery. It is meant to drive understanding.

Which is why I am not happy with the model.

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Information Governance and Records Management Need to get Radical Together

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A couple weeks ago I ranted that we were beginning to make many of the same mistakes with Information Governance that we had made with Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and to some extent Records Management. The post stimulated posts from James Lappin and George Parapadakis.

I respect both of them and it is entertaining to see them taking completely opposite approaches to the problem. It would be entertaining, for me at least, to see them debate the issue. I suspect it would get quite…energetic.

Of course, being on extremes, they both missed the mark.

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