Thoughts On The State Of Information Governance

Migrated from eDJGroupInc.com. Author: Barry Murphy. Published: 2011-12-01 10:16:52  Our September, 2011 report, “Defining Information Governance: Theory or Action?” put forth the definition of IG as: a comprehensive program of controls, processes, and technologies designed to help organizations maximize the value of information assets while minimizing associated risks and costs.  The report was the result of analysis of an industry survey conducted by ViaLumina and eDJ Group in Q3, 2011. A wide variety of industry professionals from a cross-section of vertical industries responded to the survey, providing a solid view into current IG ideas and plans.Currently, we are working on a “State of Information Governance” report, wherein we slice the numbers from the survey a bit further to gauge how mature the practice of IG is.  While the general results of the survey show IG gaining traction within organizations, the actual practice of IG seems to be fairly basic thus far.  The State of IG report will go further into the many reasons we say this, but we wanted to share one statistic that shows IG programs have yet to completely evolve.We asked survey respondents what percentage of information in their company was outdated or unnecessary.  What’s clear is that, across the board, most respondents believe there is a lot of unnecessary information within the enterprise.  This information costs money to store and poses the threat of driving up eDiscovery costs and risks.  In very large organizations (greater than 10K employees), 63.1% of respondents believe that nearly half or more of all information stored by the company is unnecessary.This is similarly true of medium-sized (great than 500 employees) companies – 58.7% of those respondents believe that nearly half or more of all information stored by the company is unnecessary.The percentage is smaller – 40.3% – in companies with less than 500 employees, but that is still a significant amount of information lying around that is useless.  This is one reason that defensible disposition has become such a hot topic within the IG realm.  And, for those who argue that the cloud eliminates the need for disposition because of the low cost of storage, wait just a minute.  Companies are still responsible for discovery of data in the cloud – there is no reason to pay to store unnecessary data simply because the storage is cheap.  That attitude always comes back to haunt companies.More to follow as the report builds out…