It's Alive! It's Alive!!

(This is the second in a three part discussion on Information Governance. For the first part, see What's So Special About Lebanon, Kansas.)

Sorry for the delay in posting the continuation of our series here. It’s been a crazy time for us at RSD. Since last time, we’ve visited customers in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Washington DC, and Texas, sharing our vision for Information Governance. Our message is getting a lot of traction among our existing customer base, and also with potential new customers. Oh, and did you read our Peugeot Press Release? You did, right? We promise there will be more to come.

Last time, we hypothesized a retail enterprise, and imagined how they might create and validate one or more standard store templates. The science behind developing these models is well-established and sophisticated, and frankly beyond the ken of regular folks like me. Our retailer accounted for laws, regulations, union rules, architectural demands, and a number of other constraints, and defined a corporate template for how their store should be organized. Their next step, and the topic of this entry, is how they'd begin building stores in accordance with their template(s).

As it turns out, this process closely parallels that which Information Governance Steering committees take in building out a corporate Information Governance model. They:

Define a standard policy, including the hierarchy of corporate information, metadata, and fine-grained retention schedules on all the above.
Define required jurisdictional variances on the policy, as required by law, internal standards and guideliness, industry best practices, or all the above.
Engage required constituencies to validate the policy.

This is fun and wonderful, and may even impress friends and neighbors at cocktail parties. However, it’s also absolutely worthless unless you translate the abstract corporate vision into something tangible and useful.

Making the Model Come Alive

From this point, our hypothetical retailer would take those models and templates, and build stores according to the standards they describe. There may be several such models… perhaps different layouts for small, medium, and large stores… urban settings versus suburban or rural… maybe even variations that account for regional variances in distribution patterns or partners. Living, breathing people would take an empty warehouse, and, in accordance with centrally defined standards, add lighting, shelves, coolers, counters, registers, and other services required by customers as they shop.

At RSD, we are proud of IG policy engine. It’s very intuitive, and provides a means for defining, validating and publishing multi-jurisdictional policies. An important competitive differentiator for us is the ability to take these policies and create jurisdiction-specific (and / or business unit specific) File Plans from them. Imagine…

… handing over to Records Managers and business users the information they specifically need, and only the information they specifically need. All content is relevant and actionable.
… their reaction to having fine-grained validated retention schedules pre-built into those File Plans, rather than defined and implemented in a separate technology or medium. (And yes, metadata, I am looking at you, too.)
… being able to automatically enforce the lifecycle actions that have been defined in those policies.
… being able to define and enforce lifecycle actions on record metadata independently from record content.
... enforcing those lifecycle actions automatically. If you are into that sort of thing.

Our RSD GLASS customers are doing all of this today.

In many ways, those responsible for managing File Plans with our Information Governance platform are doing the same work as the workers building stores. They take a corporate vision and make it a reality. In short, they are taking the centrally defined standard, and making it come to life.

Frankenstein