Too often information governance is relegated to the sidelines in large organizations. Lumped into the eye-rolling category of “things we have to do,” rather than “things we enjoy doing” or “things that bring us opportunities.” Our reasonable concerns around risk only exacerbate this and sometimes categorize IG groups as the “department of NO.”
But strong governance is much more than a gatekeeper. Strong governance promotes comfort in operations, streamlined decision-making, and the ability to see opportunities in the data that every organization holds. In this way information governance is an enabler, not a detractor, and a valuable party to invite to the table regarding data strategy, usage and management. Join us in this article as we help motivate organizational culture around governance and all the benefits that it yields.
Making Information Governance Part of the Daily Fabric
Information governance, at its heart, is the practice of ensuring that information is gathered, stored, analyzed, used, reported on, and ultimately removed responsibly. It’s a wide field covering issues such as why we collect or create data int he first place (often called the “basis”), and what our goals are in using and maintaining it over time. Too little is considered about when and how to dispose of that data, but increasingly, regulations are dictating that for us with concepts such as data minimization and the right to be forgotten helping accelerate their deletion. (And, of course, there are legal holds decelerating deletion, too!)
When information governance policies are clear, and founded in business processes and goals, they succeed. Everyone in the organization understands why they have this data, how it should be used and stored, who should have access to it and when it is time to delete the information. That enterprise-wide understanding comes about when governance is part of everyday activities as well as the over-arching corporate strategy. For example, regular reports of information past retention, or coming off of legal hold, or simply duplicative in nature help people see the day-to-day scope of their data bloat. Corporate strategies that include references to information governance help reinforce the culture, too. Consider these strategies from organizations well-steeped in governance:
As a financial entity, JP Morgan must adhere to strict regulatory controls regarding the data is collects, uses and holds. But rather than simply comply with these regulations, JP Morgan has made adherence part of their very-public corporate and investment strategy. In fact, they routinely provide specific guidance and documentation as to “How We Do Business” covering important governance topics, such as: data lineage, access control, auditability, and risk classification.
As a government entity with a rich data estate of interest to many parties, NASA is a leader in lifecycle data preservation, including metadata standards, archiving, and open-access policies. NASA’s Data Strategy document makes a specific point of emphasizing the core IG principles of: Retention, defensibility, discoverability, and structured metadata.
Enabling Safe, Effective and Efficient AI Use
The early days of risky and ungoverned generative AI adoption have passed. And in their place is a much more nuanced, and thoughtful roll-out, as organizations realize some of the dangers of training large language models (LLMs) on unclean or uncurated data. To prevent poor outcomes, many organizations are turning to their Information Governance colleagues to help draft AI governance frameworks around proper data use, sensitivity, suitability for training, transparency and provenance, and reporting and retention. For most IG professionals, this is no different than establishing policies around data in general, and expanding those to include AI use cases. The expertise and experience of IG professionals in managing, and particularly in curating, large data sets, is invaluable right now and represents a tremendous opportunity for IG groups to show their value. When it comes to AI adoption and use cases, IG teams can ensure safe and compliance use, enabling strong outcomes, all while simply “doing their usual job” of managing corporate data responsibly.
It’s quite possible that the rise and intents for AI help clear previous hurdles in organizing, remediating and classifying enterprise data. For example, though it’s always been a smart idea to identify and remove identical duplicates (ROT) to aid in search and retrieval and reduce storage costs, it now becomes essential if the AI is to run efficiently and choose the “best” data to learn from and respond with. ROT remediation instantly moves from “nice to have” to “have to have.” The same is true for document and record class identification, sensitivity tagging, and respecting legal holds. In short, AI adoption is literally making the case for proper IG. And proper IG is, in turn, literally enabling cleaner, better, more accurate (and hallucination-free!) results.
Setting the Organization up for Success
Organizations who get information governance right, and whose culture reflects and embraces that, are the most likely to succeed in making the most of their hard work in collecting, creating, analyzing and transforming their enterprise data. Information governance thrives in the organization where multiple players are invested in it.
With the volume of data always growing, security regulations, and compliance laws at risk for changing, creating a positive information governance culture makes the organization a lot more adaptable. By fostering a culture that makes information governance a priority, this automatically builds in a sense of resilience to the operations.
Without a strong information governance culture, it can be difficult to get anything done.
Organizations where information governance isn’t part of the overall culture can be riddled with issues related to their disorganized, inaccessible, or inaccurate data. This is a frustrating experience for all involved because it can slow down operations and cause headaches and rework. For example, training AI LLMs on bad data will ultimately yield poor or inaccurate results, likely necessitating a complete re-train down the line.
The Takeaway
It’s smart and strategically necessary to promote a culture around information governance because it creates a good foundation over the long term. While human error is a factor, building a corporate culture, and pairing that with automation and AI readiness, creates the ideal scenario. Otherwise, organizations may find themselves struggling to deal with inefficiencies, inaccuracies and non-compliance. When best practices are part of the organization, it makes it so much easier to control.
