One of the biggest and most immediate opportunities for cost-cutting is hiding in plain sight: in your information, the better governance of which can lead to significant savings in sometimes surprising ways.
Slashing budgets, renegotiating contracts, and postponing investments have their places, but they are messy and often temporary. Understanding what information you have, where it resides, and whether it still has business value puts you on a direct path to reducing expenses today and in the future, in three distinct respects:
1. Reduce the Cost of Owning Information
Organizations with large offsite records inventories incur carrying costs that include monthly fees for storage, retrieval, returns, re-lidding, transportation, and administration. One client discovered they were spending more than $500,000 per year storing boxes that hadn’t been accessed in years. The sheer size of this recurring expense easily justified the creation of a dedicated team to inventory those records, apply retention requirements, and defensibly dispose of what no longer needed to be kept, even knowing it would take months and maybe years to finish the job. And of course, the savings began immediately as the volume of boxes began to shrink.
The same principle applies inside the office, where file rooms and filing cabinets consume expensive real estate that might be otherwise utilized. Inventorying onsite records and disposing of those that qualify often frees enough space to accommodate additional employees, collaborative work areas, or new business functions. In high-cost office markets, reclaiming existing space is especially compelling considering how hugely expensive it is to lease another suite or relocate to a larger building – which is precisely why the just-mention client started its work there.
2. Reduce the Cost of Working with Information
Keeping only what you need is only half the equation, as governance also streamlines the way people work by making the information you retain easier to find, use, and leverage. This allows staff to make more efficient use of their time, affording them the opportunity to get more done, take on added responsibilities, or at the very least maintain their focus on their actual jobs.
This efficiency means that operational spending is concentrated more on performing tasks than being spread across ancillary-but-necessary activity like hunting for data, which only makes them take longer and cost more to complete. It was a happy day indeed when employees at a client municipality became able to locate data they needed without having to ask for help from a staffer in the city clerk’s office – a person who already had her own full-time responsibilities and was spending nearly half her time supporting other people’s work.
3. Reduce the Cost of Risk
As I’ve recently written at length, sub-optimal governance presents risks that, left unaddressed, can create expenses that are not only significant but also invisible. Obvious examples include having to pay fines resulting from a privacy breach; less obvious are consequences that arise from the likes of incomplete audit reporting, overly-long discovery responses, and business decisions that are based on low-quality information.
The literal bottom line is that governance is one of the few disciplines that simultaneously reduces costs, improves productivity, and lowers risk. Because every organization creates, consumes, and relies on information, governance affects every aspect of every business – from daily operations to strategic decision-making.
The question, then, is not whether you can afford to invest in governance but how long you can afford to keep paying for unnecessary information, inefficient process, and unmanaged risk. Done well, governance turns information from an ongoing expense into a managed resource – one that delivers measurable value long after the initial investment is made.