Same Recipe, Different Clientele
Cooking Up Effective Programs for Records, Data, and Information Governance

It’s no secret that infogov and records management can be difficult and frustrating – increasingly so as traditional areas like policy development, process improvement, compliance, retention, and destruction have begun banging into once-separate and quickly growing disciplines like privacy and security.

What seems to be lesser-known, though, is that there’s a remarkably universal strategic recipe for success in all of these different spaces, which we varyingly refer to as information or data governance, or records or content or document management, or who knows what other terms the world’s marketeers will come up with.

This apparent hodge-podge of vernacular is actually good news for the likes of us, for each term refers to a business practice that is fundamentally similar to all the others when it comes to building a program. This means that when you get down to it, there is fertile ground for you to talk to, and cooperate with, your colleagues throughout the enterprise, including compliance officers, attorneys, line-of-business managers, IT staff – and even your own team!

It also means you can follow the same basic recipe regardless of the clientele you are serving, the differences being (a) you have to speak their language so they understand the options available to them, and (b) you have to know their areas of both delight and distaste so you can season your effort accordingly.

Rough Equivalencies

By way of illustration, let’s take a quick tour of the language often used in each discipline to describe essentially the same activities: