How to Respond as Demand for Governance Automation Accelerates

Published On August 04, 2020

With much of the workforce in flux — with people either working from home, returning to restructured office spaces, heading to the office as-needed, or filling in and catching up — it should come as no surprise that information management has become more challenging in the last few months. As organizations adapt to this changed environment, they will need to prepare for an uptick in the amount and type of information generated, and move more quickly toward governance automation to manage their data.

Current conditions are driving organizations to strengthen their governance automation efforts; a recent webinar hosted by Iron Mountain and the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM) discussed how to begin. The session, called “Give Atlas a Break: When Shouldering Responsibility for Information Governance Is Too Heavy for a Human,” hosted Iron Mountain’s Steven Lester, Corporate Counsel Manager and Kelly Matoney, Principal and Practice Leader. They discussed why unstructured data in particular needs attention right now, why it’s posing such a problem, exactly what it is and how best to manage it effectively.

What Has Changed?

Managers and staff alike have had to alter how they operate in response to shutdowns and remote workforce arrangements brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. Even as the world begins to reopen, governance automation continues to feel pressure because, in the space of a few months, so much has changed: systems, processes, procedures, policies and business itself.

With a scattered remote workforce — and working with vendors whose employees have also dispersed — organizations are being challenged. Managing the volume, velocity and variety of information their teams are generating, using, managing, storing and protecting is that much harder during these tumultuous times. On top of all that, some members of the workforce have had to use their own technological devices, which are sometimes shared with others, to get their work done. This has created more than a few headaches for organizations trying to manage information that is now being generated in multiple new ways.

What hasn’t changed are the applicable laws that touch on matters like data privacy and data breaches. Yet, information that organizations would never have collected mere months ago are now a part of the new normal — “What’s your temperature? With whom have you been in contact, both on and off the job?” Risk of a cybersecurity incident has increased as well, since workers may have been sharing their devices and internet bandwidth with school-age kids, spouses and anyone else they were sheltering in place with.

At the same time, organizations still need to protect their intellectual property and other assets, get some work done, satisfy their customers’ interest in their products as well as their privacy and security. That is hard to do when more unstructured and semi-structured data is generated and needs to be tracked.

What to Do?

Learn how big the problem of managing information is likely to become in the next couple of years, and how to meet challenges associated with the spike in unstructured management by viewing the on demand webinar.