NEXTpage

The Business Case for "In-Place Governance" of Information

For years, regulated organizations have desired improvements in unstructured information management systems. But when legal risk and compliance became an unavoidable business concern, combined with the exponential accumulation of unstructured information, regulated organizations were compelled to rethink their approach and take action.

Initial attempts at managing unstructured information grew out of a “centralized” computing paradigm. This required the transfer of unstructured information to a centralized, managed repository. Unfortunately, this “centralized” model has failed to deliver the promised benefits. User adoption has been anemic and only a small fraction of unstructured information finds its way into a central repository, leaving the vast majority of information unmanaged.

For regulated businesses, approaches to the important task of information governance usually fall somewhere along a continuum of four categories. We have evaluated the attributes of the following models in an attempt to determine which approach or combination of approaches makes the most sense.