The Real Differentiators in IG Solutions

According to Gartner, Information Governance (IG) is:

“The specification of decision rights and an accountability framework to ensure appropriate behavior in the valuation, creation, storage, use, archiving and deletion of information.”

I have been in the enterprise software industry for thirty years, but I am still not sure I understand that definition. The definition is so wide that it seems to encompass most other software categories.

In fact, Wikipedia lists 28 different functional areas for IG, from records management and information security to knowledge management, big data and “data science” (whatever that means). It begs the question: what categories of software are NOT included within IG?

I am setting out in this paper to break down—deconstruct—Information Governance in a way that should be much more useful if you are trying to address an IG need in your organization.

As you will see, it comes down to understanding Information Governance as a set of five core capabilities and realizing that IG solutions share a great deal of DNA with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software.

The Five Core Capabilities of IG

One way to approach your Information Governance plan is to think of it as a series of 5 steps, or stages that every information item stored in your organization must go through.

Connect: Your organization stores information in systems and repositories across the organization, including both structured, transactional data in business systems and unstructured content such as documents, emails, web content and images. The first step in IG is to have a method to connect to information in any system in your organization. Each “connector” can then be used to view, inspect, extract and manage information regardless of where it is located.

Discover: Once you have connected to each source system, you need to assess what is in each repository. Using the insights derived from file analytics, you can map out the necessary actions to cleanse the content, delete duplicates, migrate to secure repositories, and mitigate exposure related to private information (PHI and PCI).

Archive: Archiving includes offloading inactive content from production applications to reduce costs, increase application performance, and to address compliance requirements. It includes moving inactive content to lower cost storage tiers as it ages, and archiving content according to compliance policies and application decommissioning needs.

Manage: At the center of IG is records management functionality to address key compliance and governance requirements, including retention/destruction management based on defined policies. It includes processes for the collection, indexing and analysis of records (digital or paper based, structured or unstructured) produced anywhere—and by any system—in your organization.

Analyze: Once in place, a centralized IG system provides the ability to search and analyze all content across the enterprise. That means federated search across multiple content repositories and the use of advanced content analytics to investigate issues and identify insights.

Virtually every Information Governance project involves one or more of these capabilities, combined and integrated to track and control information created by the organization. Best practices in IG starts with defining requirements in terms of these five capabilities, which simplifies the process of choosing IG solutions.

The Shared DNA Between IG and ECM

For us at Everteam, one simple way to think of IG is that it involves a set of use cases that involve the management of content from creation to destruction. As noted above, the use cases tend to center on regulatory, cost reduction and IT infrastructure requirements, and essentially comprise a subset of the functionality provided by ECM solutions.

Wait, what? IG is just a set of ECM use cases? I am not exactly saying that, but I am saying that many classes of IG problems have a lot in common with the things that traditional ECM platforms addressed.

The reality, however, is that the well-known ECM platforms are more than 20 years old, and over their lifetime they added core IG capabilities like records management through poorly integrated, acquired technologies. The result is that for traditional ECM platforms, IG is an afterthought, not a core competency. And that is a recurring pattern in the enterprise software space.

Old Software Never Dies, But It Does Become Unmanageable

Here is a simple rule—let’s call it The First Law of Enterprise Software:

Every class of enterprise software eventually collapses under the weight of its own complexity.

A software system that starts as a well-architected solution to a specific problem inevitably adds capabilities and features to address a wider set of problems as the vendor seeks to add new customers with new use cases. Eventually, through cycles of evolution and acquisition, the once-elegant system becomes unwieldy as disparate components built on different architectural models are cobbled together.

After enough cycles, the result is an inelegant system with high costs of ownership created by the complexity of configuring, managing and upgrading the system. And when the complexity and costs become so high that customers balk, the cycle begins anew with new software products that deconstruct the problem space and deliver simpler, better-architected solutions.

This is the recurring pattern of enterprise software. Eventually, enterprise software solutions become overly complex and overly expensive, as vendors seek to meet revenue growth targets by adding new capabilities (and new customers). And this certainly appears to be the case with the ECM platforms that underlie many Information Governance solutions.