A recent IBM survey found information governance emerging at the next big enterprise management trend. Of over 400 respondents to its information management study, 65 percent either had already implemented information governance or planned to do so by the end of 2011, while 70 percent expected information governance to grow in the next 3 to 5 years.

wiredFINANCE has covered aspects of information governance previously, as recently as a few weeks ago here. A failure of data governance can be quite costly. IBM reports that a large chemical manufacturer failed to destroy content and records in accordance with its corporate retention policy. So, during litigation the company had to spend over $12 million reviewing documents that should have been disposed of.

In response to the growing interest in information governance, IBM initiated an open information governance community. In addition to the survey, the company donated an open source model and some tools to the effort. More results from the survey follow.

IBM polled survey respondents on about 20 reasons for their interest in information governance. The top five reasons the respondents want information governance:

1. Improve data quality

2. Increase confidence in information for decision-making

3. Leverage more value from existing information investments

4. Enable master data management

5. Understand what data exists and how it is used

Nothing unreasonable there. Other reasons drawing almost as big a response included regulatory compliance, reducing business risk, establishing information management best practices, and improving visibility within and across business units.

The IBM survey also captured some of the respondents’ answers verbatim. Do any of these sound familiar?

• “Our new CEO discovered that reports from different parts of the organization had inconsistent data.”

• “We have no control over the data that flows into our financials from SAP/R3.”

• “We need a policy and process to handle requests for data to ensure that we comply with all privacy/security regulations.”

• “We need appropriate executive-level review and approval to ensure that each request for sharing our data externally is the right thing for us.”

To help organizations with information governance, IBM set up the InfoGovCommunity (see link above) as an open source community. This means that you can visit the site and read the materials for free. If you want to participate in the discussions or take advantage of the various assessment tools and IBM’s information governance model, you will need to pay and join at one of several levels, which start at a few hundred dollars.

Organizations today are generating massive amounts of data, both structured and unstructured. It represents a valuable asset, possibly the most valuable asset the organization has. Yet in too many cases it is barely managed and hardly under any kind of systematic governance. The situation will only get worse as organizations increasingly instrument and monitor anything that can be measured and metered. ###