Business challenge

As regulation, the threat of litigation and the uncertain cost of compliance have increased, so has the need to effectively and efficiently govern the vast amount of information your organization produces daily. Outside of regulatory compliance, market pressure for increased revenue is driving efforts to find creative ways to leverage information to increase market share, drive revenue, and maintain a competitive advantage. That’s difficult to do without establishing an interdisciplinary IG program to establish policy-level rules, investment priorities, and accountabilities for managing the lifecycle of information.

Industry fact

Only 25% of organizations have developed a comprehensive strategy to guide their advancement to information governance

Cohasset | ARMA Information Governance Benchmarking Report

How this affects you:

• Your organization lacks the resources, templates and tools to stand up a comprehensive IG program
• Your digital transformation initiatives are complicated by not having an enterprisewide approach to clean up and govern your information so you can move efficiently to the cloud
• You lack expert guidance on how to optimize your retention schedule and automated tools to keep it continually up to date

What if you could:

• Work with IG experts to help you stand up a cross-functional IG steering committee and target operating model?
• Get help in creating or revamping your retention schedule, with an online retention management platform to keep it up to date?
• Have a framework and tools to document and easily share your enterprise-wide policies to enable consistent IG practices throughout your entire organization?

IG Program Development Service

Advisory services

Experts on our Advisory Services team will guide you through the process of developing the two key elements of your IG program: your cross-functional IG structure and enterprise-wide policies. Advisory Services consists of IG professionals with deep information management and governance expertise who are trained to deliver compliant standard of care services and have established IG programs for some of the world’s largest and most heavily regulated organizations. With 20+ years of experience providing holistic IG solutions, the team includes over 100 skilled legal researchers & attorneys, records managers, library and information scientists and experts in electronic content management with practice areas in most industries.

IG Steering committee

Developing an IG program starts with establishing a steering committee and organizational structure to operationalize IG activities. Based on experience setting up IG programs for many clients, our Advisory Services team can help you identify the appropriate cross-functional committee members and coach individuals on their IG roles and responsibilities. Through best practice templates, you’ll have a trusted partner to help you develop your IG steering committee’s charter, policies, RACI model, meeting schedule and communications plan to gain traction throughout your organization. You’ll also be able to leverage years of experience in developing key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your IG program.

Customized retention schedule development

The cornerstone of your IG program lays in having and consistently using an up-to-date records retention schedule customized to the needs of your business. Our Advisory Services team will guide you through the process of creating or revamping your records retention schedule to align to select industries and geographies in which you operate. You’ll receive expert guidance on how to optimize your records classification scheme based on best practices, the level of granularity you need and your risk appetite.

Once you have your optimized retention schedule in place, you’ll work together to define your subscription profile to receive continuously updated legal retention requirements that impact your business based on where you operate and the types of law required to support your retention program. You’ll receive your feed of continuously updated, fully cited and summarized retention requirements through the user-friendly, cloud based Policy Center portal. Through Policy Center you can easily maintain and distribute your retention policy online throughout your organization.

Complementary services

With an up-to-date retention policy, you’re in a good position to clean up your legacy content through our Content Classification service, leveraging our proprietary classification rules database that systematically calculates destruction eligibility according to your retention schedule. When your documents have met your organization’s requirements of retention, our Secure Shredding Services will enable you to destroy them, confident that you are complying with regulations governing information destruction. For information you’ll be retaining, you can use our Secure Storage Services to secure and protect your valuable physical records and documents and wrap a records management program around them. You can use our Document Scanning Services to have paper documents scanned and indexed, with metadata applied, for easy data retrieval.

What you gain

• An IG framework to help you achieve business objectives, compliance with external requirements and minimize risk
• Guidance and tools for how to best structure your IG steering committee and retention schedule
• Metrics to measure the alignment of information management outcomes to business priorities and objectives
• Expert insights on how to optimize your records class structure and how to evaluate retention rule setting
• Online portal to stay up to date on legal retention guidelines, personalize your records classes and modify your retention rules