e-Records 2017: “How to Succeed at Information Governance in the Cloud”

This is the final post of a multi-part recap of the 2017 e-Records Conference. Presentation materials from the conference are available on the e-Records 2017 website.

  1. Information Governance: Take Control and Succeed
  2. The Public Information Act and Updates from 85th Legislative Session
  3. TSLAC Wants Your Electronic Records
  4. Establishing Information Governance for Local Governments in Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365
  5. Data Protection and Information Governance across Data Silos
  6. Big Data vs. Information Security: Bringing Peace to Conflict
  7. Teacher Retirement System of Texas: The Information Governance Journey
  8. How to Succeed at Information Governance in the Cloud

Content is everywhere

At this year’s e-Records 2017 Conference, we had the opportunity to attend many great and informative panels, but one outstanding lecture was given by Sonny Hashmi, MD Global Public Sector from Box Inc. Mr. Hashmi spoke about not just managing data, but also how to get the most value out of it. He shared his successful strategy on how his company, Box Inc. provides the necessary platform to achieve goals centered around Information Governance. Mr. Hashmi talked about emerging technologies and provided real world examples of how they are becoming more and more practical in everyday business. In a nutshell, new technologies are now, more than ever, extremely relevant to information governance.

According to Mr. Hashmi, government agencies are faced with unique challenges when it comes to managing data. For example, an ever-growing IT budget can limit the scope of a project. Also, managing legacy systems can be quite difficult due to the prohibitory costs of keeping old hardware in good condition. With regards to security and privacy, government agencies must ensure they are up to date with the latest technology trends for the sake of proper information protection. Challenges such as these are changing the way agencies process and manage data.

The Leadership Perspective:

  • Changes in technology are happening outside of the state and governments agencies control.
  • Business units seek out technology that will assist and improve their processes.
  • Resources are limited. It’s becoming difficult to attract/hire/retain personnel trained to manage your technology.
  • The tech itself is changing, and according to Mr. Hashmi, the half-life of technology paradigm is two years.

The Digital Experience Perspective:

  • The “Internet of Me”, personalized experiences are an expectation in all aspects of our lives.
  • Building digital experiences while focusing on a better outcome.
  • Invest in technology that can do many different things for us.

The Information Perspective:

  • Unstructured data is growing exponentially (80% of agency data is unstructured).
  • Unstructured data is stored on many different platforms throughout agencies, making it hard to manage.
  • Data breaches occur when data is not secured.
  • Ensuring the proper content is accessible.

As there are many technologies available to help manage your data, it’s important to choose technology that will improve processes while not hindering the flow of data. Organizations collaborate in ECM (Enterprise Content Management) systems more and more, thus increasing the speed of data acquisition.  While it’s important to ensure retention and compliance in your ECM, you must learn to balance user capabilities in the system.

Mr. Hashmi shared with the audience four key principles for managing data in the Cloud or in an ECM system:

  • Needs to be collaborative and process driven.
  • Needs to be secure and meet compliance requirements.
  • It should work with other applications used in your organization.
  • Don’t forget about your stakeholders, for example, the end user.

Organizations are creating more and more information every day, and with more data being stored, the harder it is to manage using only simple human intelligence. Artificial intelligence will one day become the de facto method for helping organizations manage data from the public to the end user. For now, programming machine technology to manage information curation is the next best thing.

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