Information.  You create it and store it.  You manage it and retrieve it.  You buy it and sell it.  Information is the fuel that drives your business: it's one of your greatest assets.  But it can also be a liability.  Because of the immense volume of information you manage, retrieval and discovery issues can be costly, tying up resources and in some cases, with the potential to bring business to a grinding halt.

Organisations have always needed systems to manage their information.  But in today’s business environment, mere management is not enough.  Regulatory compliance, legal requirements and business obligations – combined with the enormous growth of information resulting from simply doing business – have created the need to go beyond management and to implement Information Governance.

Information Governance is an integrated approach to managing, processing, controlling, archiving and retrieving content that documents all facets of the organisation.  It provides a compliance and governance framework to attain a global, corporate-wide consistency to manage information across the enterprise.  According to Gartner “Information Governance has become a business imperative…what is missing in most companies is an enterprise wide strategic view of information.”  (Gartner Research Publication - Key Issues for Establishing Information Governance Policies, Processes and Organisation 2008)

Most organisations produce a diversity of information managed by a breadth of policies and platforms.  They also face compliance issues that may span multiple business and regulatory requirements not to mention jurisdictions.  As the volume of information in an organisation grows, the need for effective and consistent enterprise-wide controls and governance grows as well.

Information Governance not only provides more effective management of business records, it allows for effective knowledge sharing, proactive compliance and discovery preparedness.  Information Governance also monitors and manages an organisation's growing volume of email and other digital communications, helping them control the growth of stale or outdated content.

On a broader view, Information Governance integrates an organisation's information processes and lifecycles and increases the visibility to their information landscape.  Information Governance also produces documentary evidence that can help measure the effectiveness of risk and information management.

Successful Information Governance pulls together enterprise records management, email archiving and eDiscovery technologies.  Over the past few decades, as organisations have moved from paper records to digital, they have not only seen an increase in information, but also an expansion of the repositories where this content resides; from multi-vendor content repositories deployed throughout an organisation to worldwide data centres to laptops to cell phones.  Knowing what to retain, where to find it and how to retrieve it is an objective of any comprehensive Information Governance strategy and solution.

Oyster IMS provides software, professional services and consultancy around Information Governance to help organisations:

• Reduce cost
• Minimise risk and exposure
• Increase litigation readiness
• Maximise existing technology investments