What Is Information Governance and How Does It Affect Your Business?

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December 10, 2020 Business

Even though we currently live in the age of information, where data is slowly but surely becoming among the most valuable assets (if not THE most valuable one), there are still businesses out there that are not taking basic Information Governance too seriously. In order for your company to be cost effective, its workflow truly data-driven and your data protected, Information Governance is a notion that needs to be incorporated in your business model and operations.

However, the survey-based data states that a fairly low percentage of organizations is doing this to a satisfactory degree.

According to a study conducted by NewVantage Partners, 72% of companies surveyed do not feel their business has a proper “data culture” in place, while another recent survey states that over 70% of employees are granted access to critical company data even though they shouldn’t have access to this type of sensitive information.

These numbers are ripe for drastic change and Information Governance is the model you should be thinking about.

What is Information Governance?

Information Governance involves the effective use and management of a company’s data-based assets and resources with a goal of achieving the highest possible value of processed data, as well as reducing data-related risks to a minimum. It involves abiding by the relevant rules, standards, as well as legislation, regulations, and policies your business is required to comply with during the process of obtaining, creating, sharing, and processing data.

This is why it is essential to come up with an effective strategy your organisation handles, stores and archives data. This framework of procedures and operations needs to be optimized according to your own data management needs and wants, and involves key components like keeping records, smart data storing, content management, data classification, auto-classification, imaging, but also data recovery and accessibility.

As soon as your business and staff adopt the proper mindset in terms of Information Governance and incorporate a proper IG strategy, you will have an effective and secure plan that encompases all the necessary aspects of proper data management, including your compliance with legal, regulatory, audit, and discovery rules/requests made by regulatory bodies.

Being capable of dealing with all this, along with correctly taking care of data privacy, storage, archiving, search-friendliness, and retrieval – enables your company to unlock the all-encompassing value Information Governance is able to provide.

Main Advantages of Having Proper Information Governance in Place

Risk Reduction & Improved Regulatory Compliance

Good IG plan ensures that you and your employees have access to the right data at the right time. It helps you keep your information updated at all times, and through deploying proper classification, nomenclature and systematic tagging processes – it makes sure your data and operations are clearly defined, archived, erased, etc. High accessibility, along with user-friendly and quick data retrieval, creates a streamlined workflow for the purposes for auditing as well as complying to all legal and regulatory requirements, which results in reducing business risks and security issues to a minimum.

High Information Policy Consistency Across Your Entire Organisation

It is not a good practice to let individual staff come up with policy applications within your company. Instead, a professional Information Governance approach allows for a consistent and centralised application of the information management policy, thus creating a pragmatic yet tight way of meeting all regulatory requirements, as well as your business’ data management and availability needs.

Effective Accessibility Management, Restrictions and Archiving of Valuable Data

Modern companies have extremely high data flows. The information that comes in, gets processed, and then shared with clients and employees is quite valuable and requires a multi-tiered management model in terms of proper levels of smart accessibility.

You need to ensure that the right type of data, especially that of sensitive nature, isn’t available to just anyone. Certain data needs to be restricted to pertinent individuals in your organisation, but it also needs to be highly accessible at the right time and place.

For example, be sure to incorporate effective email archiving solutions that will keep your email-based data secure, organised and easily retrievable in cases of potential legal-related scenarios. Emails carry a vast amount of sensitive data about both you and your clients, which means proper storing and security of these documents is key.

Data Storage/Administration Cost Reduction

With a quality IG plan, your redundant data, systems and apps get identified and managed in a cost efficient way so you are not paying for the storage and operations your business no longer requires. This accounts for both storage and cost optimisation.

Increased Agility and a More Effective Decision-making Process

An organisation that has a subpar data management and IG tactic isn’t capable of collecting, storing, analysing, and deploying data for the purposes of improving upon its operations and overall success. When it comes to agile decision-making, a clear overview of data is crucial to all employee and executive levels.

Summary

Corporations, enterprises and SMEs, regardless of their operating niche or industry, need to pay close attention to the way their information is being managed and must deploy a proactive and transformational way of handling it. And before they start thinking about future-proof models like AI-based and machine learning-based data management, they need to have a proper, more basic Information Governance plan in place.