It’s the time of the year where experts and critics provide a “top 10” list. I promise not to bore you with exhaustive list of predictions; lessons learned, or industry trends. When it comes to information governance, here are three things to look for in 2011.

More companies will integrate and enforce their policies and retention schedules into their infrastructure

Historically, the records management department was responsible and accountable for defining and managing the corporate retention schedule. This “3 ring binder” simply listed cryptic categories with a defined retention period. Slowly, companies have been taking the retention schedule into the IT infrastructure and manually enforcing the schedule within the information management infrastructure. The most common repositories include email and selected ECM systems. However, most of the time what’s being enforced is simply retention and legal hold. What about data privacy? How about metadata lifecycle management? 

What to look for in 2011: Policies will be expanded to include other facets of information lifecycle and will be deployed more and more across structured and non-structured repositories.

Industry standards need to be embraced and enhanced

Industry standards are great – only when it solves a business problem, and both vendors and customers embrace them. Information governance requires different and disparate systems to talk with each other. This includes software coming from competing vendors, such as ECM and RM systems.  CMIS and JSR-170 promised to address this but only did to a certain level. The current CMIS design does not include basic ILM functionality which is a little disconcerting.

What to look for in 2011: Updated specification to CMIS. 

New vendors will claim to have an information governance solution

A couple of years ago, there were only a couple of vendors touting an information governance solution with RSD being one of them giving a Podcast at the ARMA 2008 conference. Today, things look awfully different. Just do a search for information governance solutions in Google - and go through the 8 millions results. These solutions come from so many different angles – records retention management, ECM products, search tools, infrastructure giants, storage vendors and eDiscovery players (who are now telling people to be proactive when it comes to litigation).

What to look for in 2011: More and more companies will be repositioning their existing products as an information governance solution.