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Why We’re All G-Men (and Women) Now

Governance.

It’s what content management, records management, business process management, SharePoint, and myriad other information systems have in common. It’s one of the things that complicates any move to the cloud. And it’s too often overlooked as disparate technical and line-of-business teams rush to complete projects before either the budget hammer falls or internal politics grind them to a halt.

Simply put, governance is the practice of regulating the rollout and management of information management solutions so they don’t conflict or confuse and thus negate any possible opportunity for improvement. Simple, right? Yeah, surre.1

My pal Gordy Hoke said this week that “records management evolves to information governance,” and he is so right that it’s just not fair. The hard part is that it’s not just records management for which this is true, as all the various forms of “managements” require it. But because there’s so much overlap between them, it can be terribly difficult to come up with a plan that embraces them all – especially if each one is tackled on its own.

Turned around the other way, this means that information managers of all stripes must make governance a priority – not just directly in their own areas of responsibility, but as ambassadors to the other areas they intersect with as well. Projects that have governance committees at their heart tend to be successful; those that don’t, aren’t.

And that’s as compelling a reason as there is to re-up as a G-(wo)man yourself.

1 Outfielder Jim Gosger as quoted in baseball tell-all Ball Four

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