Presentation 1. Information governance in the age of big data

Organizations have understood the value of their structured data - mostly financial transactions - since the first mainframes were developed in the 40´s. Data quality issues have always been a challenge and the increasing numbers of applications consuming and producing structured transactional data has grown exponentially. Unstructured information has been given less significance and strategic importance and therefore fewer resources and less attention on the part of leadership. All of that has changed and is changing faster than anyone imagined. Unstructured content is what humans produce. They create the documents: strategies, proposals, support documents, marketing content, white papers, engineering specifications, etc. that form the intelligence and core knowledge capital of the enterprise. Many organizations have left business units to fend for themselves and “go figure it out” with little guidance or support. These has led to terabytes of content that people cannot find their way through and that leaves the organization open to risks, liabilities and costs of e discovery. According to the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, a gig of data costs $30,000 in e discovery costs. The cost of storage is ten cents. The problem is that the enterprise does not understand the hidden costs of not making data accessible and usable - lost time, lost IP, inefficiency, poor customer service that can lead to lost customers, slower growth, etc. As newer collaboration technologies are deployed, they expose the bad habits and sins of the past. Deploying a new search engine shows that the content is not curated. Standing up a new content management application like SharePoint reveals the haphazard shanty town of an information architecture with inconsistencies in models, terminology and applications. Today´s landscape of marketing and customer experience technologies is complex and interconnected and requires those upstream knowledge processes th- t produce unstructured content as the fuel. Customer experience entails everything that happens before you purchase (marketing, education and outreach), when you purchase (e commerce with product content and data), and after you purchase (self-service systems and knowledge bases that support the call center). This is the customer lifecycle and at each step in the process systems and tools need to be harmonized as they gather information about the users using attribute models that are consistent and that serve the business and the customer. They take content and data as input and then output more data. One applications exhaust is another applications fuel. Organizations are also purchasing data streams to enrich their internal information sources. Social media is an enormous virtually untapped reservoir of data about customers and what they think about organizations. This can be mined for sentiment and to gauge marketing effectiveness. Increasingly, much of this is being placed into the hands of the marketing organization. In fact, a study by Gartner Group said that by 2017 the CMO will spend more money on IT than the CIO. What all of this means is that information, content and data governance need to be considered as part of a whole and not as separate initiatives. Elements of good information governance include: Deployment and Operationalization; Alignment with User Needs; Business Value; Buy-In and Change Management; Sponsorship and Accountability Leads to the following outcomes: Manages conflicts in business priorities (between initiatives, business units, drivers, etc); Allows for ongoing input from various stakeholders and constituencies in order to evolve capabilities with the needs of the business; Prioritizes efforts and allocation of resources; Assigns roles and responsibilities with accountability to critical functions; Takes into consideration various levels of maturity in the organization - no one size fits all; Ensures that investments in systems, proc