It's been a travelling week, hence no posts as I find it difficult to sit still and write when on the road.
What made this trip unique was that I had three separate customer interactions around the same topic: information governance.
Each of them got to the same place, but through a different path.
There's either a trend here, or perhaps I've succeeded in deluding myself ...
A Quick Summary
As I've mentioned before, the case for IT playing a role in establishing information governance is pretty clear and compelling.
information is becoming the most important asset in most organizations -- with every day it's not only growing, but it has an increased ability to make you money, save you money or get you in a lot of trouble.
Unlike money and finances (which has clear governance and ownership within most organizations, especially public ones), very often it's not clear who performs the same role for information.
And that lack of clarity is going to be the root of more problems in the near future.
Yes, IT runs the infrastructure, and implements new applications -- but that's not the same as owning and managing the corporation's information portfolio.
And, now that I'm looking for it, I'm seeing more and more examples of customers who are either edging towards that world, or have already acknowledged the need and are actively working to get a process of information governance established.
Here are just three anecdotes from this week.
The Reference SAP Implementation
I met the CIO from a large manufacturer who had done the textbook SAP implementation -- global view, single instance, single client -- the kind of SAP implementation you read about. Very cool.
As we talked and shared ideas, he offered that -- because he had a strong ownership role over the single SAP instance, he was well placed to drive the information governance discussion at his company.
He had no problem figuring out retention policies, master data management, protection, security, etc. of information within his SAP environment, because the senior management of the company was very, very focused on the SAP implementation.
He shared with a bit of delight around having executive meetings that focused on such things as data quality, master data management and other rather esoteric information management topics.
His situation was pretty special -- I don't hear many stories like that.
But, as we dug in a bit into information governance and management topics, he admitted there was still much more to do.
He had an engineering development team that probably wasn't managing information well.
And then there was the email and filesystem beasts to get after.
But I was struck on how their centralized SAP implementation brought executive focus to information issues -- rather than IT issues.
They had collectively acknowledged the importance, and had built the basis for a solid information governance function, and could easily move forward.
The Stuck Email Archiving Project
A seperate meeting got into very familiar territory.
This customer had done the storage tiering and service level catalog thing, and done it pretty well. They now wanted to tackle tiering and archiving on their email environment.
The case was pretty compelling. Their email environment had, for whatever reason, ended up as the corporate dumping ground for files and information of all sorts.
Users had enormous mailboxes, and had gotten into the habit of just keeping emails with large attachments around as their primary repository. Need a file? Wait a moment, I'll send you a really big email.
Storage, servers and networks were groaning under the load. Backups weren't happening as they should, and some users were starting to complain of slow email response.
Couldn't imagine a more classic case for email archiving, no?
Wisely, they had decided not to simply limit mailbox sizes, as they though that everything would simply move to PST files.
Good decision.
But their email project was stuck in an interesting place. Nobody could agree the email archiving policy to be used. When does it get archived, how long does it get kept, and when does it get deleted?
Legal had one view. Business users had another. IT and finance were looking at costs.
And they'd been stuck there for a few months.
We started to talk about the problem as an information governance problem.
They needed a recognized. legitimized forum where all three perspectives (cost, value, risk) could be put on the table, and a rational business decision reached.
They also agreed (with a little prodding from me) that this wasn't going to be the last time they would need to convene the same group of people around future issues, like files, or database records, or encryption, or ...
They saw that a governance mindset was probably needed.
I'm looking forward to checking back in a while to see whether it worked as well as we had all hoped.
Encrypt My Tapes
A third customer meeting got into the topic from another direction entirely.
Within a few minutes of starting, they were hammering me with all sorts of question about encryption technologies for tape and disk.
OK, I asked, why the big interest?
They'd just been given the mandate to start encrypting all their tapes. Selective encryption wasn't probably not a bad idea, given the type of information they were handling, but there was more to it.
The problem was that there hadn't been much discussion. Some of the data was sensitive, to be sure, but not all of it. And encrypting every backup felt like overkill to them.
There was the cost of the technology, the effort of implementation, the need to build new processes around key management, and -- of course -- the stuff ran slower.
They wanted to use a selective approach, not only for the above reasons, but they also knew that the technology was going to get a whole lot better next year -- better encryption engines, more flexible implementation options, and improved key management.
But they didn't have a forum to take their concerns, and have the practical discussions around reasonable tradeoffs.
Someone, somewhere in the organization had decided that tape encryption would be a good idea, and so it was ordained.
Knowing the way things sometimes work in large companies, I bet there was a management meeting on another topic entirely, somehow the subject came up, everybody at the meeting thought it would be a good idea, and that was that.
Mandate established.
Here, I saw sponsoring an information governance function -- a regularly scheduled meeting with all the right people in attendance -- as more as a defensive move for the IT guys.
You don't want these topics coming up (and being decided) randomly, do you?
Who knows what'll come up next?
Do All Roads Lead To Information Governance?
There are more examples I'm seeing.
Customers building service level catalogs for storage (or backup, or DR, or information security) need a regular forum where they can help build a common shared perspective of the issues and the tradeoffs to people outside of IT.
Or an attractive outsourcing/out-tasking project gets wrapped around the axle because of "security concerns" -- none of which are being intelligently discussed.
Just like the financial team meets and discusses financial audits, there's a need to do the same thing in the information world -- is our information secure, and how do we know it is so?
I can make case after case afer case that -- sooner or later -- we'll see well-established information governance functions sprouting up like weeds in the corporate world. I've discussed how EMC is not only investing in this need, not only with technology, but with a new breed of consulting services.
It won't have much to do with technology. It'll have everything to do with information.
So What Path Will This Follow?
The real question for me is whether information governance and information management will follow a similar path as we've seen in the financial world.
If you think back to the 60's and 70's, a lot of what we take for granted in regards to financial management in the corporate world simply didn't exist.
But look at what we are today.
Financial governance is a top board-of-directors issue. Outside entities routinely examing financial management practices, and report publicly on their findings.
And mismanaging money -- in any regard -- is a Really Big Deal these days.
Are we that far away from a world where the same needs to be done for information?
And are you an informationist?
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