The fact is that most people will either embrace or decline information governance depending on their individual situation at a certain point in time. Information governance is closely allied with privacy and security. Knowledge as internal currency that needs to be managed wisely, which is where a governance procedure would be helpful.

It is entirely possible that someone might curse a rule as arbitrary while simultaneously recognizing the necessity of it from a security standpoint. Someone else could easily applaud relevant search results without actually realizing the role information governance played in facilitating that relevance. And there’s always “that guy” who complains regardless of whether the complaint is justified.

The modern workplace is increasingly spread out in many locations, with employees and expertise spread across multiple offices and areas. This makes it very difficult to know what information exists and where it is kept.

We can make the assumption that a majority of a company’s information is stored on hard drives, content management systems, file sharing applications and in the minds and memories of employees. This creates a few problems:

Many organizations that deployed a content management system have gone through phases of deployment, development and upgrades without leveraging common practices around information architecture and usability.

In some cases, a well-intentioned IT department holds user requirements sessions, only to implement the technical features without truly understanding core principles of usability. In other situations, a particular process will be enabled and user tested with good design principles but employing the “build it and they will come” deployment plan.

Records management is very important for companies. There are many electronic records management systems that can optimize the process of records management. However, the huge amount of data is raising new challenges about how records management should be handled.

A few of the ongoing issues include big data, master data management (MDM) and how to deal with unstructured data and records in unusual formats such as graph databases.

Records are kept for e-discovery, compliance purposes, for their business value, and sometimes because no process has been implemented for systematically removing them. This might be a double-edged sword: getting rid of data makes IT nervous, but there are times when records should be dispositioned.

GDPR compliance is being enforced. The GDPR has already garnered international attention, with similar legislation in the works in countries like China, Japan, India, Brazil, and New Zealand. Attention around the GDPR has been mounting in US. Beyond the United States and the other countries already mentioned, most experts predict that an even wider rollout of consumer data protections is inevitable.

Since GDPR took effect, Google was fined nearly $57 million for processing personal data for advertising purposes without obtaining the required consumer permissions. Google also failed to adequately inform consumers about how their data would be used, nor did it provide enough information about its data consent policies.