Best Practices in Information Governance
4. Your Governance Tools Must be Designed for Today’s Communications
Equally important, organizations should be asking whether the technologies they currently use to capture, retain, supervise, and discover business records (or data that might be responsive to civil litigation) were designed for the communications of a different era. Those continuing to leverage technology designed 10–15 years ago may be in for a big headache the first time a large legal matter or regulatory inquiry arrives that requires the review and production of social media, instant messaging, or voice communication.
For example, all major archiving products and eDiscovery review tools were designed specifically for email. Many have the capability to understand other communications formats, but must first convert them into individual email messages to be processed. In order to review a conversation taking place over a series of Tweets, for example, a series of independent messages need to be threaded together to understand the conversational context. This process is not only time consuming, but also significantly increases the risk that important parts of that conversation may have been deleted or missed entirely.
Understanding how new communications and collaborative tools will impact current regulatory compliance, eDiscovery, and investigative tasks is a critical task to learn early—not when the next major event is at your doorstep.
5. The Likelihood of Governance Success is Directly Proportionate to Cross-Functional Involvement
Finally, and somewhat obviously, is that the success of information governance initiatives are directly related to the quantity and quality of cross-functional support and buy-in from compliance, legal, infosec, and IT stakeholders. The importance of this alignment has been heightened by shifting communications and collaboration patterns experienced by organizations as business users have proved to be resilient in their desire to use whatever communication tool that is demanded by their customers, partners, and prospects. Blocking the use of these tools has been proven to be a failed strategy. Fewer IT executives are claiming to be aware of all the communications and collaborative tools that are in use today by their end users. More are recognizing the need to implement a process to understand and evaluate the tools available in the market and prepare for the possibility of their use (sanctioned or otherwise) by their employees.
Cross-functional programs to assess the business value and potential risks of new communications and collaborative technology continues to be more the exception than the rule. However, it is a positive step we have seen being taken by more organizations who have acknowledged that the days of information governance programs focused only on the use of email, files, and documents are numbered.
Actiance is the leader in communications compliance, archiving, and analytics. Actiance provides compliance across the broadest set of communications channels with insights on what’s being captured. Actiance customers manage over 500 million daily conversations across 70 channels and growing and include the top 10 U.S., top 8 European, top 5 Canadian, and top 3 Asian banks.