Data and compliance: A guide to being an information herder
This is the second article in our two-part series: “Data and compliance: A guide to being an information herder.” Part 1 of the article, published in the January 2023 issue of CEP, described the dangers of information hoarding, including the legal, compliance, and business issues affecting companies lacking adequate insights about the information assets they possess and how that information is being used, managed, protected, and retained.
This installment provides practical steps and a high-level roadmap to help fix the sprawl of your company’s information footprint so you can transform from a collection of information hoarders to an organization of information herders. We have divided this second installment into two parts:
General advice on developing a business profile assessment (BPA) that will enable you to better manage data and compliance.
Tips to address some of the specific data management issues and concerns highlighted in Part 1.
How to find and end information hoarding: The BPA
As we explained in Part 1, you cannot transform from information hoarding to information herding without understanding what information your company has, what obligations exist with that information, how long the information needs to be retained for legal or business reasons, and who should have access to it. Answering these questions requires a foundational understanding of what you are doing today as a business. Invariably, when we help businesses with data and compliance, we learn that management generally understands what business activities the company is engaged in but does not comprehend all initiatives, relationships, contracts, projects, and potential sources of revenue and risks across their enterprise and how this affects their information ecosystem.
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