Organizations that are serious about managing corporate information through establishing in place processes, responsibilities, controls, and metrics that treat information as a valuable business asset need to pay close attention to information governance trends. Following up with these trends increases the trust among your customers, partners, and key stakeholders as it demonstrates clear commitment to data privacy, security, and ethical practices.
As information volumes continue to grow exponentially, understanding the components of IG and following trends in data classification, storage, and retention helps organizations to deliver information to the right audience and the right time and place enabling faster and more informed business decision-making.
The information governance trends in 2024 are:
1. Increased Focus on Information Quality
With the growing importance of information and their types, companies are starting to pay more attention to ensuring its quality. This includes ensuring accuracy, completeness, and consistency.
Businesses must only collect high-quality information part of their IG strategy and properly preserve it in order for it to be evaluated later and provide insights to drive business decisions and efficiency.
Collecting poor quality information will increase storage costs, maintenance, increased challenges, and above all drive wrong business decisions.
2. Wide Usage of Artificial Intelligence
Leveraging artificial intelligence in information governance has become vitally important for organizations. AI can help organizations with:
- Automatic classification of information by types.
- Extract useful/high quality information.
- Auto-populate metadata (automated data entry)
- Hide personally identifiable information (content redaction) from unauthorized access.
- Process large amount of information.
- Complete management of information lifecycle.
3- Cloud-based Governance
Migrating to the cloud is gaining fast momentum specially after the COVID19 pandemic hit. Having on premise or hybrid architecture is causing businesses to struggle with allocated resources and budget. In this tight economy, it is one of the best decisions to move to the cloud to reduce the operational costs and human resources needed to maintain the infrastructure.
In addition, the cloud offers more flexibility and scalability that organizations need to add or remove resources when needed without investing in expensive hardware and infrastructure. This also can help in allowing employees to access data and application from anywhere without the need to be physically at work and to maintain the foundations of IG.
4- Blockchain for Data Integrity
By nature, the blockchain technology is decentralized and tamper-proof which can be used in managing information to enhance transparency, data integrity, and security. It creates an immutable ledger where every transaction is securely preserved and recorded which allows to track and verify all data movements.
It also prevents unauthorized modifications establishing a trusted source of truth, strengthens data security, and reducing the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches particularly in industries such as finance, supply chain, and healthcare. The use of smart contract can also automate predefined rules and policies which reduce the error of failing to comply with the available IG framework.
5- Automation
Automation is considered one of the most critical information governance trends as it can help organizations comply with different rules and industry regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX. By reducing manual tasks and transform to digital automation, less data entry errors will be created, and a consistent outcome will be provided which ensure high quality results.
Through automation, organizations can implement standardized workflows for data classification, retention, and disposal, reducing the reliance on manual interventions. Automation tools can automatically enforce data governance policies, ensuring compliance with regulations and internal guidelines.
6- Data Retention and Disposal
Businesses are starting to place greater emphasis on defining, executing, and enforcing data retention and disposition policies to ensure compliance, reduce physical or digital storage costs, and reduce maintenance.
During the last couple of weeks, we have been contacting different stakeholders in international companies to ask about their implementation of retention and disposition. Compared to previous researchers, we can conclude that more and more organizations are giving this topic higher priority in this year.
7- More Emphasis on Data Democratization
Data democratization has emerged as one of the top information governance trends due to its potential to empower organizations and individuals with data-driven decision-making capabilities.
Organizations are trying their best to shift away from traditional data management approaches towards enabling broader access and utilization of data across the enterprise. This helps in providing insights and identify patterns from each individual if applicable rather than a selected few.
By embracing data democratization in the context of robust IG practices, organizations can harness the full potential of their data assets while ensuring compliance, accountability, and responsible data use.
8- The Rise of Remote Work
One of the newest IG trends is the rise of the remote work that organizations are facing and the difficulties of providing a smooth working environment where employees can digitally collaborate together and access information when needed highlighting the need for organizations to adapt their governance guidelines to support a distributed workforce.
The remote work has increased the complexity of DM and how security should be configured to stay compliant and minimize or eliminate data breaches.
Organizations are focusing on implementing secure remote access solutions, ensuring encrypted data transmission, and enforcing multi-factor authentication to protect sensitive information.
9- Collaboration and Communication Governance
Organizations are depending more and more on digital tools for collaboration and communication. Therefore, it is essential to apply governance concepts to these platforms to ensure the safe and legal handling of shared data.
This involves establishing guidelines and limitations for file-sharing services, email systems, and messaging programs, among other things. Organizations may better protect sensitive information, enforce data retention regulations, and ensure regulatory compliance by putting governance measures in place in these collaborative spaces.
