The Fog of Information Governance

The point here is that the functions of managing record retention and disposition, electronic discovery, data privacy, audit trail, etc. are inter-related. In fact they are more than just inter-related, they are part of an emerging underlying concept: information governance.

Organizations need to avoid siloing these governance functions into separate solutions. Instead they should look at them holistically and integrate them into unified corporate information governance programs.

Here’s a “plant safety” analogy: Once “fire safety” consisted mainly of deploying fire extinguishers. People quickly realized that the threats of chemical spills, personal safety, etc. were just as bad. Organizations eventually developed safety programs integrating all aspects of safety. Then they weaved these programs into the infrastructure and corporate culture. Fire extinguishers became part of these safety programs.

RSD GLASS Information Governance Solution Platform
RSD GLASS is an information governance platform that allows organizations to:

• Provide users with simple and rapid access to content in all corporate repositories; and
• Provide internal transparency by weaving information governance capabilities into the fabric of the content infrastructure.

RSD GLASS incorporates in its design a new and creative approach for the management information lifecycle. It incorporates the principles of the OAIS archiving framework model (ISO 14721:2003) as well as the principle of separating the core RM functions (policies, control and administration, and enforcement) into independent services-based layers.

With RSD GLASS, organizations can build corporate information governance programs and weave the policies and processes directly into the IT infrastructure and its content management and business application components.

• The information governance steering committee defines the corporate policies (web-based field surveys are used to collect the records requirements):
  • Retention and disposition;
  • Metadata and content index lifecycle;
  • Storage-based content lifecycle;
  • Electronic discovery and hold policies;
  • Data privacy policies;
  • Digital rights lifecycle—when content is outside the firewall
• The information governance policies are then deployed within the infrastructure in application readable and integratable form:
  • The policies cater to the specific requirements of the jurisdictions;
  • The policies can be applied to content in all types of repositories, including RSD’s own RSD folders, ECM systems, database applications, data warehouses, etc.;
• Changes to laws and regulations trigger policy review cycles which in turn lead to the creation of new releases of the master classification;
• Business events that occur within business applications trigger event-based lifecycle activities within the RSD GLASS solution¹;
• The local records administrators in the jurisdictions perform the routine administration of the records
• Record lifecycle activities (disposition, content index deletion, etc.) are enforced onto the content repositories; and
• The legal department can perform discovery within the jurisdictions and across jurisdictions (all forms and formats), place records on hold, and produce these records.

1 “End of Employment” event in HR Application for “John Smith” triggers: a. the start of the 7 year retention for all HR records of “John Smith”; b. the disposition after 2 years of the content indexes of all these records from the content search database; and c. the anonymization of all these records after 4 years.

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Founded in 1973 in Geneva, with affiliates in New York and London, RSD helps companies meet the growing challenge of information governance by providing market-leading products for business information delivery, content and records management and document archiving and retrieval. RSD is positioned in the leaders quadrant in Gartner, Inc.’s “Magic Quadrant for the Integrated Document Archive and Retrieval Systems.” RSD solutions are used by more than 1,200 organizations worldwide, including a majority of the Fortune 500 enterprises. Today RSD supports more than 2 million users, and offers its innovative products and services in more than 26 countries—both directly and through strategic business partners. For further information, please contact www.rsd.com

1. Enron, 9/11, Coleman v. Morgan Stanley, Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) amendments of 2006, etc.

2 Unstructured electronic documents, records in high volume reports produced by corporate applications (e.g. customer statements), information in application databases, information in data warehouses, information in intelligent content addressable storage appliances, etc.

3 Loaded cost: IT staff, facilities, infrastructure, servers, mirrored sites, backups, etc.

4 Example: Case management applications.

5 Example: Records management focuses on managing the retention and disposition of unstructured documents only as opposed to managing all aspects of the lifecycle of all forms of records including structured information in high volume reports and databases.