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Information Governance
Oakleigh Consulting understands the need for information governance and has experience in the following different areas:
- Helped with the definition of information repositories, ensuring that consideration is given to external and internal information and as to how best it may be structured.
- Assisted with the creation of data models, ensuring that the emphasis on their use is kept as an important consideration, rather than merely a documentation exercise.
- Ensuring appropriate access to information is a key responsibility for any governance activity, and the interaction between this and any organisational security processes and procedures is a fundamental to Oakleigh's approach.
- Putting measures in place to measure the success of information governance has also always been an important consideration
Our experience with information governance shows that:
- An overall framework that guides the development of an information architecture should be put in place.
- This information architecture can then be used as a basis for governance
- Information governance must be actively promoted within an organisation
- Overseeing the development of information governance means a combination of appropriate technology, changes to processes, and way of working to manage the effective use of information.
- There is an ongoing requirement to facilitate connections, coordination and communications to ensure that governance reaches all appropriate parts of the organisation.
- There are a lot of standards which may be of relevance in this area, for example: W3C, OASIS, HL7, OWL, RDF, e-gif, e-GMS, SCORM, x-GEA, IPSV, SAML, and British Standards such as BS8723. Most of these standards are in a perpetual state of flux - it is important to understand which matter and which are for guidance only.
Once information governance is in place, it is important that any future changes to organisational norms and values drive effective changes to how that governance is carried out. Often organisations need independent expert advice to assist them to accurately state how they gather information via, for example:
- OCR and scanning
- Voice input
- Other sources
- To ensure all information that is needed is included and managed in the governance process
- To organise, and catalogue information to ensure it is...
* Indexed
* Filtered
* Linked - To refine and contextualise this information so that it can be...
* Collaboratively used
* Compact & efficient
* Effectively explored - To define the best way to disseminate the information flows so that it can be...
* Shared
* Used for alerts
* Pro-actively pushed
How we have helped our clients
Information governance is a key and consistent theme throughout most of our assignments, and we have helped our clients with aspects of all the above points, often as part of other assignments, for example:
- Worked with a large government agency to assess how consistent metadata could be implemented
- Recommended a consistent approach to information governance for a government research agency
- Worked with one a global reinsurance company to define a consistent data model across their organisation