Crafting an information governance strategy

Information enables business, yet it often goes ungoverned in most organizations. Many organizations don’t know how much information remains unstructured and unsearchable.

In a recent KMWorld webinar Michael Shattuck, manager, Widen Consulting Group, explained how to develop stronger IG practices and collaborate on optimization efforts that take advantage of the best that people, processes, and technologies have to offer.

Citing Gartner, Shattuck explained that information governance 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. It includes the process, role, and policies, standards and metrics that ensure the effective and efficient use of information in enabling an organization to achieve its goals.”

According to Gartner, more than 80% of organizational information is unstructured. It’s difficult to find, integrate, validate, or automate, Shattuck said.

There are several questions to consider that companies should ask themselves while strategizing for the best IG practice. This includes:

• What are the core pieces of information that need to be tracked?
• What is the full information lifecycle, including: creation, management validation, consumption of these pieces of information?
• Where effectiveness and efficiency is being lost due to issues with information flow?
• How can current technology solutions be used to improve the speed and effectiveness of information flow?
• Do we need to bring structure to unstructured information?

The Widen Consulting Group can help organizations optimize their content, Shattuck said. The group provides strategy design workshops to help the marketing technology leadership team align on long term direction and tactics needed to inspire teams to meet their goals.

Change management consulting includes on-site workshops to build change plans for large initiatives.

And the group also provides process improvement facilitation. This helps teams identify optimization opportunities, build execution plans, and define success measures.

An archived on-demand replay of this webinar is available here.