In the next couple of days, I will be heading out west to San Francisco for the ARMA International conference. I have been to ARMA before and certainly looking forward to catching up with old friends and meeting new ones. I will also be curious to see how many records management vendors will be “repositioning” their products as an information governance solution.

Information governance is becoming a top priority for many c-level officers since it helps companies better manage risk and increase the value/use of corporate information. IBM’s acquisition of PSS Systems and the recent press release from RSD has created a buzz in Twitterland.   
I received about 100 emails with several meetings just from this press release – confirming the urgency of a true end-to-end information governance solution.

Information governance can be broken down in the following four categories:

• Policy management – Information governance begins with a policy. Included in the policy is retention/disposition, rules and regulations, data privacy attributes, storage lifecycle management, and lifecycle of the metadata. The policy is then validated by all stakeholders.
• Lifecycle management – The idea here is to enable records managers and business managers to manage the lifecycle actions as defined in the policy. These actions must be controlled and audited (independent of the repository).
• Enforcement – The scheduled lifecycle actions must then be physically enforced in the repository infrastructure. This includes structured and unstructured repositories.
• Role-based access – Finally, the business needs to have high-speed secure access to information regardless the format or how it’s stored.     

An end-to-end information governance solution enables organizations to seamlessly go from central policy to control/administration to enforcement. I will be curious to see how IBM, Autonomy, EMC, HP, and others address the information governance challenge.

This year, RSD is proud to be a silver sponsor along with IBM and HP. Please see us at booth #918 as we are looking forward to talking about your information governance challenges and showing you why RSD GLASS is the most comprehensive information governance solution on the market. 

After all – seeing is believing.