2026: The Year Poor Information Management Becomes a Top Enterprise Risk

Why Leaders Must Act Now to Strengthen Their Information Governance Foundations

For years, organizations have watched unstructured information grow quietly in the background—emails piling up, Teams chats exploding, shared drives multiplying, and documents scattered across cloud platforms. Everyone knew it was messy. Everyone assumed they’d clean it up “one day.”

That day has now arrived.

2026 is shaping up to be the year poor information management stops being an operational inconvenience—and becomes a measurable enterprise liability. Across every sector, analysts, auditors, and advisors are telling executives the same thing:If your organization doesn’t get control of its information ecosystem in 2026, costs, inefficiencies, and transformation failures will accelerate.

This blog breaks down the risk, the data, and what leaders must do now to stay ahead.

The Hard Truth: Most Information Is Already Out of Control

80–90% of enterprise content is unstructured  (Gartner, IDC, AIIM)

And it’s growing 20–40% annually, exploding across:

• Teams

• SharePoint

• OneDrive

• Email

• File shares

• Mobile apps

• Departmental systems

• Vendor platforms

This sprawl creates blind spots that no tool alone can fix.

ROT Is Consuming Storage Budgets and Lowering Trust

40–60% of enterprise content is ROT  (Iron Mountain, Cleardata, AIIM)

Redundant. Outdated. Trivial. And it’s costing organizations millions.

AIIM reports that up to 35% of total storage spend is pure waste caused by unnecessary content.

This is no longer a cleanup project. It’s a financial drain that hits budgets, system performance, and user trust.

Employees Can’t Find What They Need — and It’s Crippling Productivity

60% of workers say they cannot find the information they need to do their job (McKinsey, SearchUnify)

Employees now spend 22–28% of their workweek searching for the right version, the right folder, or the right system.

This is not a soft issue.  This is a hard productivity loss and a driver of burnout, turnover, and stalled execution.

Retention & Disposition Are Still Broken in Most Companies

Despite years of policies, training, and tool investments:

72% of organizations admit they do not consistently apply retention or disposition rules (AIIM)

Content piles up. Risk piles up. Costs pile up.

Regulators, auditors, and legal teams are beginning to ask tougher questions—questions that require evidence of governance, not intentions.

AI Projects Are Failing Because the Information Foundation Is Cracked

57% of AI initiatives fail due to poor information quality (IBM, Deloitte)

Not cyber. Not privacy. Not even the model.

Just bad, outdated, inconsistent, or duplicated information feeding the system.

Broken content = broken insights.

ROT in → ROT out.

Organizations cannot modernize with yesterday’s information habits.

2026–2027: The Forecast Leaders Must Pay Attention To

Analysts predict a widening gap between companies that address IG now and those that push it off.

➤ 2024–2025: The Breaking Point

• 60% of companies say they can’t keep up with unstructured data growth (IDC )

• 72% admit they lack consistent retention and disposition (AIIM )

• Companies retain 30–50% more ROT than in 2023 (Iron Mountain )

  
  

➤ 2026: The Year the Shift Becomes Unavoidable

• 60% of companies will have an IG maturity gap creating measurable operational inefficiencies (Gartner)

• Executives will spend 30% more time managing information-related escalations than in 2024 (Forrester)

• Unstructured content will surpass 93 zettabytes globally (IDC)

  
  

➤ 2027: The Divide Between Leaders and Laggards

• Strong IG programs see a 35% increase in AI project success rates (Deloitte )

• Mature IG organizations reduce redundant storage by up to 60% (Gartner)

• 70% of transformation failures will be tied to poor information quality—not technology (McKinsey)

  
  

What This Means for Executives in 2026

Information governance is no longer a back-office function.  It impacts:

• operational efficiency

• decision accuracy

• employee performance

• compliance confidence

• customer responsiveness

• technology ROI

• AI capabilities

• organizational agility

Leaders who treat information as an asset—rather than a byproduct—will outperform. But the reality is that most organizations do not have the internal bandwidth or cross-functional expertise to fix this alone.  That’s why we’re seeing accelerated demand for:

• fractional IG leadership

• targeted IG modernization projects

• unstructured data cleanup

• metadata and classification improvements

• pragmatic retention/disposition models

• AI readiness assessments

• cross-functional governance alignment

This is not a luxury. It’s becoming standard.

2026 Is the Year to Act

The true risk isn’t the volume of information.  It’s continuing to operate with broken habits, outdated structures, and unmanaged content.  In 2026, the winners won’t be the organizations with the most data— but the ones who manage information with clarity, discipline, and purpose.

#infogov #informationgovernance #informationrisk