The rapid increase in digital collaboration provides challenges and opportunities for effectively managing Information, its reliability, retention, protection, and ability to find valuable information to support efficient business decisions. As work increasingly happens in Microsoft 365, governance (and its adoption) is an essential component of managing your corporate information and knowledge in the cloud.
To get their work done, people in your organization collaborate with others both inside and outside the organization. This means that content no longer stays behind a firewall—it can roam everywhere, across devices, apps, and services. And when it roams, you want it to do so in a secure, protected way that meets your organization’s business and compliance policies. When this information is no longer needed, it should be disposed to meet compliance requirements.
What is the risk?
Insufficient information governance controls and lack of user awareness are recognized growing risk of information leakage in the organization. Increased data privacy regulation and threats from cyber events, along with the trend for more IT cloud services, a long-term future of hybrid working and the need to collaborate and share information within a complex eco-system staff, contractors, partners, and customers adds new risks to protect value leakage within the network perimeter.
Furthermore, the explosion of data often inhibits the ability to know where information resides and how to classify and protect it from leakage or value loss.
How can we convert Information into an Asset?
The focus needs to expand from securing the network perimeter, hosting environment and end point devices, to managing identities, protecting, and disposing information itself based on its classification, retention, access controls and inherent technical protection. There is an opportunity to build and proactively push and progress Information Governance Maturity from the outset and to develop digital skills and ‘know how’ to accelerate the organisation to higher levels, and set conditions for a highly collaborative, centralised, and integrated digital future.
Integrating an effective protection and governance design with Microsoft 365 implementation reduces the costs and risks associated with information, increases the value of information, and therefore supports organizational growth.
What are the key components my organisation should consider?
The rapid increase in digital collaboration provides challenges and opportunities for effectively managing Information, its reliability, retention, protection, and ability to find valuable information to support efficient business decisions. As work increasingly happens in Microsoft 365, governance (and its adoption) is an essential component of managing your corporate information and knowledge in the cloud.
Infotechtion has the subject matter expertise and the framework from practical experiences to guide your initiative in creating value from Information. It is pivotal to a forward-looking organization that fosters good management practices, embeds the standards, right behaviours and delivers technologies to capture the value from enterprise information assets. Essentially, moving away from just data management to an enterprise-wide governance model.
At the core of a governance model are business stakeholders, who are primarily responsible for business decisions and have a keen interest in value – the degree to which it helps drive purpose of the enterprise. If that value expires, nowadays very quickly, the business could lose interest in managing enterprise information.
An effective governance is not just technology implementation, but an evergreen corporate objective, enabled by programs, policies, people- and a range of technologies to manage information.
The critical success factors to embed governance policies and procedures with business activities are:
Automate Governance - Accurately identify, retain and protect sensitive information across your enterprise with comprehensive classification capabilities, including machine learning and rule-based automation. Infotechtion team works closely with Microsoft in early previews of latest automation features and have successfully put them to use at other customer projects.
Modernize Policies – Modernize policies to balance the regulatory and digital collaboration needs for all digital information & structured data. Identify technology solutions to meet business / regulatory constraints, e.g., Approaches for identifying non-business information to unblock automated protection and retention of business information.
Unified Change Management – Mastering new technology early through pilots will help accelerate the adoption. Educate users on how the technology helps reduce the burden by automating complex rules whilst building the trust with the users. Infotechtion has specialist training modules for records management, Information privacy and protection management in M365.
Accelerated Technology Enablement – Quickly activate technology and setup to operationally scale in alignment with the maturity goals and use cases. Infotechtion team can guide your technical team in configuration of policies, and analytics across your environments, Microsoft 365 apps and services to ensure technology is production ready to meet the challenging needs of the enterprise.
Establish Key Performance Indicators and Reporting - Capture each expected business value of Microsoft 365 along with the KPIs and targets for each business scenario. Identify how you will measure and report against KPIs to gauge adoption. In this regard, Infotechtion team has developed metrics considered essential in tracking adoption across the enterprise.
Getting the most value possible from any asset is dependent on how effectively that asset is managed, and information is no exception to this rule. Getting the balance right between user productivity and safeguarding information is vital. Therefore, it is required that users know their information and how best to manage it.
Why Partner with Infotechtion?
Infotechtion provides a proven framework to proactively push and progress Information Governance Maturity from the outset and to develop digital skills and ‘know how’ to accelerate the organisation to higher levels, and set conditions for a highly collaborative, centralised, and integrated digital future.
If Information governance and compliance is an opportunity or a risk to manage, Infotechtion can help you establish an IG Strategy and Blueprint for M365 Information Governance to improve information availability, trustworthiness, and completeness while reducing operational costs and risks.
Feel free to contact us to schedule a call to discuss how to best manage information in M365 and fast track the migration, e.g. using Azure AI. Below are some blog post that may be of interest:
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