We work with data all the time, without fully realizing that wrong information, incomplete information, information of uncertain source, or of uncertain meaning, information taken out of context, or otherwise misinterpreted – can substantially subvert our ability to reason and make the right decisions.
For a business enterprise, the problem is compounded by a variety of factors, such as--increasing amount of structured and unstructured data we can access, its internal redundancies and deltas, its necessary (and sometimes unnecessary) duplication and spread; increase in reliance of decision-makers on the metadata we wrap around actual information to represent its provenance and indicate its meaning; increase real need to use data as inputs for decision-making, and then again, as metrics, to judge if decisions were sound. Everyone, in other words, is faced with too much data to check, but with the need to filter and act on that data effectively.
Even though most business leaders understand the need for high-quality data, they are often not sure how to achieve it. And yet, it has become clear that an investment in the infrastructure must be made to ensure measurably acceptable data quality.
Information Governance – which is about building a concrete methodology for discovering, combing out, labeling and schematizing, optimizing, protecting, permitting, and forbidding access to data – in short, everything you need to be sure that information and its use are being handled in sound ways, under control of enterprise policy.
Most enterprises which are heavily IT-dependent, are facing some very serious issues concerning the management and governance of information, effectively managing the risks inherent to information management and complying with regulations at the same time. They realize that having a clear understanding of customers, partners and suppliers can mean the difference between growing a business and failing to compete. Critical initiatives for information governance, compliance and master data integration simply will not succeed unless the quality of the data in systems is clearly understood and actively managed.
Key Challenges
The effects of poor data quality include failed business processes, lower productivity and wasted materials. Lost, inaccurate or incomplete information also generates higher costs and extra work, such as hunting down information or additional reconciliation.
In times when global and local regulations are changing rapidly, it is very hard to find a simple and straight-forward solution to these issues. When considering any effective solution, companies need to concentrate on few important things:
- How effectively any proposed solution can manage the risks embedded into current state of business & Information affairs?
- How effective the proposed solution can be to mitigate the future risks which haven't yet been fully envisaged?
- How efficient the proposed solution actually is to meet the growing need for creating process transparency across whole organization?
- Whether the proposed solution would allow organization to have and employ dynamic metrics to manage and control risk measures?
Before taking a final call for any information management & compliance solution, you must critically evaluate what is brings to the table. Essentially, it must incorporate:
- Software applications to successfully meet the information governance-related issues
- Software application to effectively manage the compliance-related issues
- A framework to ensure the safety and privacy of the information, to maintain data and process integrity and to comply with both national and international security/privacy standards
- Powerful reporting capabilities which can be customized for measuring risk and for demonstrating compliance
- Enhanced capabilities to generate automatic current and future-state scenarios & blueprints, so as to facilitate the long-term management of governance, risks & regulatory compliance
Above all, an ideal information management & compliance solution must embed risk and compliance controls in everyday activities which are easy-to-use for end-users. It seamlessly integrates with existing IT infrastructure while reducing the training costs & time drastically. Having a bird's eye perspective, it must enable workflows and processes for new and existing regulations such as E-discovery, SOX, MiFID, NERC, PCI DSS, and more.
Data quality can determine business success or failure
Having a clear understanding of customers, partners and suppliers can mean the difference between growing a business and failing to compete. Critical initiatives for information governance, compliance and master data integration simply will not succeed unless the quality of the data in systems is clearly understood and actively managed.
Note : It is extremely imperative to complement Information Governance, Risks and Compliance solution with very sound 'Business Process Continuity' capabilities. So that In the event of an incident, your business continuity management capabilities can help end-users to access essential services via underlying unified communications technologies and collaborative workspaces, processes, and workflows.
The rapid adoption of cloud and online services introduces new concerns around governance, risk mitigation, and data compliance. Information Management & Compliance solution must be future-ready for the cloud environment.
Most organizations have not yet evolved their processes, policies and infrastructure to be able to help ensure high data quality levels. As a result, organizations are beginning to adopt information governance, a quality-control discipline for adding new rigor to the process of defining common terminology and managing, using, improving and protecting information.
Effective information governance can enhance the quality, availability and integrity of a company's data by fostering cross-organizational collaboration and structured policy-making. It balances factional silos with organizational interest, directly impacting the four factors that an organization cares about most: increasing revenue, lowering costs, reducing risks and increasing data confidence.
Information governance enables an organization to monitor its information supply chain as an end-to-end system, helping to ensure that information is consistently defined and well understood, of high quality, managed throughout its life cycle and protected and secured wherever it lies. With information governance, organizations achieve many goals, from improving decision making to simplifying and strengthening regulatory compliance.
Nonetheless, it must embed last-mile compliance workflow at the desktop level, integrating governance, compliance or risk-management into daily activities, through collaboration of IT and business stakeholders. Yet,
It ensures that right information is available at right time, in right format.