Reimagining the Governance Profession
In my previous posts, I discussed four ways of “Reimagining” Information Governance:
Post #1 - Reimagining Information Privacy.
Post #2 - Reimagining Information Security.
Post #3 - Reimagining Information Authenticity.
Post #4 - Reimagining Information Retention and Disposition.
I started this series talking about my reflections on records and information governance created by my five-year odyssey to discover the story of my Italian immigrant grandparents, who arrived in the United States in 1921 and disappeared during the 1930s, presumed dead. (Spoiler Alert: They weren’t!)
That journey culminated in a keynote at ARMA Infocon21 last week, and the release of my book ,Immigrant Secrets: The Search for My Grandparents, during the conference. (In need of a keynote for a chapter or company event? Information HERE.)
As I thought about questions related to records and archives and governance, it struck me that I owe a huge debt to decisions made a century ago by unknown information professionals. These decisions created the stable information management framework that allowed a host of later technology innovations (OCR, AI, and Ancestry.com among them) to resurface the lost story of my grandparents.
I wonder what information searchers a century from now will think of the decisions we are currently making and how well the information we leave behind will reflect the reality of everyday life in 2021? The fact that I am a bit of a “word” person will not come as a surprise to those who know me, so during my keynote I thought about a bit of a word salad of the terms that come to mind when people think about the information governance profession. Here’s what I came up with; and yes, there’s a bit of hyperbole here.
I think we're viewed as rule followers. We're often viewed as an obstacle to accessing information and as gatekeepers to the information people want. We're viewed as being on the fringe of IT and as barriers to getting real work done. We occupy a niche that very few people understand, and we are often immersed in our own discipline and language. Sometimes we're actually in the basement. And we are viewed by our organizations often as a cost of doing business.
I then thought about how we would LIKE to be viewed by some future information consumer. As we think about the future, I'd like to challenge us to imagine—or maybe reimagine—some of the terms that we want to be associated with our profession. I’d like us to reimagine how we communicate about ourselves and about what we do. Yes, it's not going to happen in six months or a year. But thinking long term, I believe there's a different vision that we can establish for what we do.
I think this vision centers around being platform definers, facilitators, and stewards of information, rather than just gatekeepers. I think we should aspire to be at the core of IT and an enabler of real work. We must become a mainstream competency that the executive suite understands and appreciates and play an active role connecting with all the other disciplines that rely on private, secure, authentic, and trusted information. And lastly, I would hope that information governance and information governance professionals would be at the very heart of the way that business is done.
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Early registration is now open for the 2022 MER Conference – in person! The MER Conference 2022 agenda is taking shape and will feature keynote presentations and interactive sessions on the most important Information Governance topics facing business today and in the future.
Early registration information is HERE - Agenda details will be fleshed out in the next few weeks.