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the Free CMSWire NewsletterAgile Governance to Ensure that Reliable Information is Available Anywhere Anytime
A good many companies now have information functions in the Cloud, for a variety of reasons. There is the purposeful selection of cloud services for the usage and management of data, content, records and documents — in other words, information — that supplements or replaces systems inside the firewall. There is also the proliferation of data and content — more information — created in many cloud-based sites not under the control of companies. But companies want and need all of this Information — and also need energetic ways to govern all of this information as it flows in and out of the spaces used by enterprises.
Going with the notion that for most enterprises knowledge is power, information-led business innovation and competitiveness is becoming a recognized path for potential success. In parallel, services in the cloud are talked about more and more as enablers of innovation, as an agile, dynamic and cost-effective environment for new business direction and experimentation.
With so much information created anywhere-anytime, information governance has a vital purpose: ensuring the flow of reliable information to the right people at the right time. This can also mean reducing former barriers and changing processes, to make more of this information and data available to more people in the enterprise, sometimes including partners and customers. What should be emphasized is governance that aligns with how information is used in the enterprise, so that governance also connects to business value and corporate strategic goals.
So when we’re talking about innovating information governance, we’re no longer in a vacuum or in a silo, off somewhere in that “information department” — we’re talking about the entire enterprise of integrated business processes and management infrastructure, running on-premises, in the Cloud and in-between. Everyone in the enterprise has to be on board, from top to bottom, across teams, internally and externally, working in concert to enact effective information governance.
Priming Information Flow: Anywhere, Anytime
There is no doubt that most companies must extend their information strategies to capitalize on highly relevant information that is continuously created in the cloud. Strong information governance policies and practices must realistically enable the flow of information to continuously bring information to the enterprise — to improve decision-making, to better understand current and desired customers, improve competitiveness and support all significant goals and strategies in the enterprise. Information governance can be a vital part of the "framework" for business agility, responsiveness to competitive pressures, support for new product and services directions and innovation shepherding.
Enterprises need to break free of old perceptions and implementations of information governance where silos and disconnectedness dominate, and where governance has been viewed as difficult, esoteric and somebody else’s problem. Companies generally have not taken a holistic view of business information governance, its impacts across end-to-end processes or business units, or the technologies to support it. Instead enterprises have treated information as islands within specific system silos, and have taken the same approach to its governance. Information governance overwhelms many — many get lost in the details.
If information has become essential to corporate success, then information governance must become part of a company’s overall business strategy. An upper management team, comprised of cross-departmental members, has to set the high level "culture" to enable agile information governance: a corporate "infrastructure" of cross-team collaboration, an enterprise-wide commitment to levels of excellence when connecting with and serving customers, recognition that content from social sites matters, the dynamic means to process all potentially useful data and content no matter the source, and the ability to provide on-demand data and analytics ready for any device.
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