About Information Governance

With the digital universe doubling every few years, the explosion of digital data has created opportunities for harnessing the data to improve efficiency and make smarter business decisions faster. But with it comes inherent risk, also from a legal standpoint. Big Data is a challenge to manage and most companies struggle to do it effectively; 90% of a company's dark data is unstructured and unanalyzed, its potential untapped. The most compelling reasons for having an IG program in your company is to reduce risk and gain greater insight as to the business value of your data.

Before Big Data, decisions on how and where data should be kept were mainly made by the individual employees who created and used the data, and this is still a prevalent model. Nowadays, more structure needs to be implemented in how data is stored, managed, and retained so that inadvertent disclosure or hacking of sensitive information, such as personally identifiable information (PII), personal health information (PHI) payment card information (PCI), or other confidential data, is prevented. In place are the typical records management and content management programs, which are designed to perform this important function, however they tend to be applied reactively and not up to the challenge of keeping pace with the data deluge.

Consider the following quote from Gartner:

IG fills the void by looking at information management much more comprehensively and proactively. IG along with IPRO connects the processes, roles, policies, standards, and metrics that traditionally have been managed as separate programs.