The modern data-driven organization has a peculiar problem: we’ve never had more information available to help us make decisions (thank you, dashboards! thank you, AI!), yet we often have less confidence in that information than we should. Maybe we notice inconsistencies in the reporting, questionable data provenance, or simply have a nagging gut feeling that something doesn't add up. Either way, these are potential risk surfaces that shift the focus from the decision to the data – a time- and attention-eater that good governance can largely eliminate.

A growing number of offerings lately seem to be targeting information inventory automation – and I’m definitely a fan, because inventorying information can be such an onerous task. (See here, here, and here for more.) But as in any competitive arena, the devil is in the details, and so far, I haven’t seen any that are as comprehensive, lightweight, and deterministic as the one we use to expedite this process for our clients.

Anyone who’s been through a merger or acquisition knows that data and information governance rarely shows up as a distinct part of the due diligence process. Pieces may surface in IT, legal, privacy, security, or compliance reviews, but they tend to be examined independently and in narrower contexts. That’s a missed opportunity because what happens after the deal closes often depends less on the systems than on the information contained therein – and the institutional knowledge surrounding it.

One of the biggest and most immediate opportunities for cost-cutting is hiding in plain sight: in your information, the better governance of which can lead to significant savings in sometimes surprising ways. Slashing budgets, renegotiating contracts, and postponing investments have their places, but they are messy and often temporary. Understanding what information you have, where it resides, and whether it still has business value puts you on a direct path to reducing expenses today and in the future, in three distinct respects:

Migration projects are typically lengthy and costly, in no small part because they involve moving vast amounts of information and data. However, the load can be lightened by asking two questions before you get started: How much do you actually have to move, and how do you decide what goes and what stays? The answer, in a word, is governance…

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Organizations are investing in artificial intelligence at an extraordinary pace. Yet only a minority have seen enough of a return to warrant scaling it across the enterprise. Most often, this is because the quality of the information they are feeding the technology is uncertain, and they aren’t sure whether they can trust the resulting output. This places every decision, every action, and every compliance response based on that output at risk.

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When people think about privacy, they often look outward, to cybercriminals attempting to penetrate systems and steal personal information. But most privacy risks are found much closer to home: not in external malicious activity, but in ordinary internal workarounds that emerge because of practical gaps in information governance. We see it all the time: Remote workers who cannot access their approved repository and save sensitive documents to unprotected shared drives instead…

Imagine a burst pipe floods your records room, or a wildfire burns your building, or a cyber incident takes down your vital systems. Do you know what kinds of information and which of your repositories are most critical for you to most quickly restore? If not, or if you haven’t checked lately, then governance is how to most effectively remove the guesswork from your initial recovery efforts.

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