Putting in place the right information governance (IG) strategy helps your company or organization meet different ends. It is advisable to craft an adequate and performing IG plan in order to reach your goals. IG is the best way of streamlining your data management by ensuring compliance and reducing storage costs. Here are the best practices for information governance.
Determine the Business and Compliance Requirements
In order to implement the best information governance strategy, your organization needs to endorse industry-specific regulations. In other words, you have to know precisely the set of data access rules and retention policy applied to your business area. At first, the main role of your IG committees is to determine the company’s specific criteria. Should you classify data based on its content or on client information? Each business has to meet specific requirements.
Adapt the IG Policy to Remote Work
As remote work has highly expanded since the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to adjust your information governance practices accordingly. Before the health crisis, organizations used to store their data in servers and intern content management systems. The pandemic forced companies to practice remote work which increases their need of generating data in different places. Anyway, remote workers have different needs in terms of content. They use more recorded meetings and instant messages for example. You have to take it into account when updating your information governance strategy.
Outline Key Information Governance Plans
It is crucial to outline key governance plans in your policies and standard operating procedures. As a matter of fact, efficient IG governance always proceeds together with successful content management. You need a whole team dedicated to it, a team which is able to implement software-based rules aiming to limit access to your content. If you have not already done so, you have to hire specialists to define processes and procedures that all business users will have to follow. Moreover, human resources or compliance teams must be involved in reinforcing these rules.
Monitor Compliance with Reports and Alerts
We recommend you to define reports and alerts to better and more efficiently monitor compliance. Reports and alerts allow you to outline your content policy and maintain visibility of end-user policy compliance. Thanks to this IG strategy, you are notified for each policy violation by any user, each content deletion and each content creation and external sharing of confidential information. Also think about including the solutions to those incidents in your information governance plan.