Information Governance 101

The Sedona Conference defines Information Governance as "an organization's coordinated, inter-disciplinary approach to satisfying information compliance requirements and managing information risk while optimizing information value."

Simply put; Information Governance is getting trusted information to the right people at the right time

Information Governance can be broken down into four basic components:

• ​What are your information assets?
  
• Where are they located?
  
• When can you dispose of them?
  
• Who manages them and has access to them?
  

​​If this sounds like Records Management, it's because it is. Records Management is the foundation of Information Governance.

• ISO 15489 provides International Standards for Records Management and defines a record as "information created, received and maintained as evidence and information by an organization or person, in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of business."
• Records, regardless of media, contain information that is a valuable resource and an important business asset.

Information assets should be managed by an organization throughout their life cycle, which consists of three basic stages: creation, active maintenance and use, and disposition.

A recent Compliance, Governance & Oversight Counsel (CGOC) Survey showed 1% of enterprise data is subject to litigation hold, 5% to regulatory retention and 25% had some business value. This leaves 69% of enterprise data possibly valueless or R.O.T.

R.O.T. is an Information Governance acronym which stands for data that is Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial. The goal of Information Governance is to eliminate R.O.T. which reduces storage costs, increases efficacy by decreasing the amount of information you have to search through to find what you need and mitigate the risks of keeping "everything".