Implementing Information Governance – Organization

There are three essential factors that contribute to the successful implementation of an Information Governance Framework: Policies, Management and Organization, and I will in this post focus on roles and responsibilities in the organization.

New ongoing roles and responsibilities that will need to be set up for ECM to work properly in an organization, and one of the key roles is that of the Content Management Function. This could be a single part-time role for a person in a small organization, or a whole department in a larger one. The tasks of the content management function include:

• Maintaining the top-level (corporate) Business Classification Scheme
• Development and application of organization-wide Information Management and Content Management policy
• Leading the Community of Practice for Content Management
• Advising on the content management implications of relevant legislation such as Privacy, or Data Protection, laws
• Defining reference information to be used by the ECM systems
• Ensuring that information is preserved in the interest of both the business and its customers and partners, and in the national interest
• Carrying out disposition reviews according to the retention schedules, transferring information to archive, or destroying those no longer required
• And auditing staff compliance with policy, standards, and guidelines

Most organizations find it beneficial to create specialist teams physically close to the end users to help them configure the ECM Environment to their preferred ways of working, and to provide hands-on support as required.  We call these teams, ‘information hubs’ or ‘iHubs’, to emphasize the importance of their location at the centre of user groups within the organisation.  This is a much more effective arrangement than merely leaving all support to a central IT Help Desk.