Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: When Moore and I got together to discuss what podcast episodes we wanted to redo, this episode ranked Pretty high. I believe our explanation was something to the effect of it's important to have the right team in place in order for your information governance program to move forward.
I totally agree. Without the right people in place, it just seems so hard to get any traction for an IG project.
I mean, who, who cares if you can't find anything in email, can't find anything in storage, have duplicate versions of contracts and other important records on every physical and electronic storage platform, right? Oh, and don't forget, we keep everything forever and a breach will never happen to us. Yeah, that's all good until something big happens.
Once you determine that you want to take a stance and get organized, increase efficiency and reduce the risk of unwanted, unnecessary documents and data across your organization, this episode will help you understand the key team members necessary to make information governance change happen.
Let's take another listen to developing champions for your information governance program.
Hello.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us. This is what counts by Trailblazer Consulting. In this podcast, we highlight proven solutions that we have developed through our experience working with companies across various industries. We talk about how you can apply them to your company. We share our experience working with companies to solve their information management challenges. We tackle records retention schedules, program implementation and training, and more complex challenges like asset data management. This is Lee, and in this episode, Moore and I will discuss our experience developing champions for your records and information governance program.
[00:01:41] Speaker C: Thanks, Lee. All right, so today we're going to take a little bit of a different turn. We've spent a lot of time talking about the assessment process, how we go out across a company, or how you can go out across your company and start to understand how the information is flowing. How is it being created? Where is it being stored? How is it being shared? Well, one thing that all of those actions have in common is people are doing that for the most part. So today we want to talk about people, because information management is really about behavior. It comes down to how does each person in your company interact with the data that they need to do their job? Can they find what they need? Do they know where to get it? Are they hoarding things because they're afraid they're not going to be able to find it?
How are your central repositories and your platform systems supporting your business processes? Or do you have a lot of shadow process going on and a lot of workarounds because people don't really trust those central systems, or there are big gaps between what one enterprise system can do and what another enterprise system can do. And there's a lot of business and a lot of process that has to happen in between.
So today we're going to talk about people, and Lee mentioned champions and coordinators and liaisons, and we're going to talk about every one of those. And then in our next episode, we're going to turn back to steps and program elements of a successful information and records management program and talk about a structure, a framework that you can use to organize your approach to managing your information.
So when we start talking about the information management programs and what to do next, one of the things that we've picked up along the way during all those interviews, talking to people across the company, is we've got some people in mind who are going to be helpful, some people in mind who might need extra help, and we've got some ideas on how to proceed. If you're talking about your own company and you're in house, you also already have a great idea about that. So what we usually look for first is a sponsor. The sponsor needs to be a senior person, a voice, a face for the program.
That's usually not you. It's not the person who's doing all the work, but iT's the person who's giving you the entree into the C suite, the COVID you need, and the reason for being there. This person understands that the way that information is managed has an impact on the bottom line. It has an impact on the risks or the liabilities that the company faces. And the better managed your information is, the more value it can bring to the company. So that's your sponsor? It's often the general counsel in different companies that we've worked with, but not always. It can be a senior commercial person who's really got a handle on how information can help improve the business. It could be a compliance officer, senior compliance officer, chief compliance officer, who understands, especially in a heavily regulated industry, how important managing data and being able to quickly respond to inquiries and hand over to regulatory authorities. Here's our data that proves that we followed our process. Here's our data that proves that our product is safe. That's a great executive sponsor to have.
The CIO can also be the executive sponsor, but it's got to be a CIO who understands how information impacts the business, someone who has a seat at the table with the other senior leaders of the company. And over the years, we have had sponsors in all of those areas, and it comes down to their vision for what information can do for the company and your vision as the leader of the program for how to get there, how to make it better.
But you can't do it by yourself. You need some help. And we look for that at the next level. Two things. One is champions, and those are other senior people who understand the vision and are willing to support it, actively support it. So they're going to talk to their teams about it. When you ask people to make a change in what they're doing or when you want to spend some money, put in a new program, put in a new software system, these people will support that. Not blindly. They're going to look for a business case. They're going to look for how it affects their team, but they're supportive of the program moving forward.
And then you also need a small working group or a steering committee, typically not more than three or four people, and you're in touch every day or at least every week. Here's where we're going next with the program. Here's how these initiatives that are underway are going, whoops, we ran into something and we need to get together and brainstorm on how are we going to move forward.
And that group, they can be in it, they can be in legal, they can be in the business. It's really more about the shared vision and about them being committed to helping get this program moving.
Then there's sometimes a governance committee that includes sort of mid and senior level managers from across every part of your organization.
You're not going to see them very often. They're like a quarterly semiannual group that meets just to keep up to date, make sure they have all the information about what's coming next so that they can help you move things forward.
The final group, the biggest group, is some hands on people. We've called them in the past with different companies, record coordinators, record liaisons, record specialists. Basically, it's a group of people who are spread out across the company. They're in every office. They're in all the different departments or different teams inside large offices. And you bring them together more often and you give them regular updates, you give them extra training. You give them a conduit, a communication channel where they can come back and ask you a question because they're the ones who are going to make this happen. And you need to give them all the support you can so that they can make it happen in every part of the organization.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: Maura, I just wanted to throw out a question here.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: You're talking about all these people, but.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: What we're dealing with is electronic data. Can't we just make systems do all the work?
[00:08:30] Speaker C: In theory you can. I want to say though, that it's not as easy as it sounds.
It requires a lot of discipline and it requires a lot of enforcement of process through systems. If you don't make the systems support the process that exists already in your company, people will find a way around the system, they will find a way to save extra copies of things. They will find a way to share data outside of the channels that you provide for them. So you can lock all that down. You can make it a very rigid process where information flows through a system.
And that's not a bad thing, but it's not cheap and it's not easy. And you do have to still get everybody on board, or you have to have a company culture where that discipline is deeply instilled. And I have seen one organization that did that. In fact, I have seen two. Two organizations that have used an enterprise ERP and enterprise resource planning platform over the years. One very large, one very small, where they each put their entire business process through the ERP, from the creation of content, the creation of their product, all of the documentation that went around it, any regulatory reviews that they had. And the large company did have a number of regulatory reviews, all the way through to the sales, the marketing, the customer pieces, and then the finance and reporting back end. But what was similar in both cases between the very large company and the very small company was 100% commitment to this is our process and we're all in this together.
So that's an option.
Most companies don't have that 100% commitment and also don't have that discipline to create such a strong technology platform for their business processes. And to be fair, most companies have more than one major business process going on, more than one major business line. Both of these companies that we saw that I've seen make this work had one, one single focus. So one was a medical device company. Everything was focused on that. That was the big company. The other one was a click ad company in the very early days of content creation for the Internet. And they were very focused on taking the concept of ad views in magazines into ad views online. And they were a small group, they were dedicated and they made it work very well. But it was only one line of business in each case. So most organizations, you're going to need to involve people, you're going to need to get them on your side, and you're going to need to spend time on the change management and the behavior changes.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: Another thing I thought of is that, boy, this is a lot of time. I need to get a sponsor that's going to take a lot of their time. I need to get champions in different departments. That's going to take a lot of my time, as well as their time that's going to be dedicated to records and information management. You talked about a governance committee meeting that's going to be quarterly. So now I have everybody in a particular room talking about things, and you talked about liaisons that have their hands on this work and so forth. But if you think about it a little bit more, people are doing these activities now, right? And all we're trying to do is just shape them into a more formalized record keeping approach and or a program that kind of is designed to make sure that we're following regulations, getting rid of material in a timely fashion, helping the workflow. So it may seem like initially you're adding time to people's schedule, but they're doing this now and they really just need to be harnessed in and taught the right way to do it.
[00:12:41] Speaker C: That's a great point, Lee, and it does take a sort of a mindset change, and that's really what we're going for here.
For instance, I'm working right now with a company where we're implementing an email management system. And up until now, there's been a pretty free reign as far as saving email. And in this company, a lot of business process is done via email, and so people really depend on it.
So when you talk about how long this might take, we're asking people to start storing email records in a different location, a shared location, one that can actually be managed and have retention applied to it and security applied to it, and that can therefore be accessible to other team members. That's a big change. And we're hearing a lot of kind of fear. Wait, these are my emails. But as we're getting through the process, through the training, people are starting to come around on that, and now it's more about time. It was so easy when all I had to do was just have it in my email and not have to do anything with it. It was just there whenever I wanted it. And now we're saying, take a step, put it in a folder. So I think you're exactly right when you say they're spending this time anyway. They're not spending it the day the email comes in, because that day they're just reading the email, they're reacting to it, and they're leaving it in their inbox when they're spending time is when they have to find it. Because if you have 50,000 emails in your inbox, it's not easy to find any given email when somebody asks you for it, when you have to do a follow up or you have to provide this data because you're having an audit. So they're spending a lot of time searching those emails, looking at everyone that comes up with a keyword or from that same person or from that same time period to try and find the one they kind of remember had all the information in it, that time adds up. And when you're talking about a company of 20, 00, 30, 00, 50, 00 people and you're doing this over and over and over again every day, that's a huge cost. So as we're getting people used to the idea at this company of moving their email into these retention folders, they're starting to realize some benefit. And they're talking about, oh, yeah, we couldn't find that email because it was in somebody's email box who left and it got destroyed when that person left. And we didn't know that was the only place it was. So we lost it. So now they're really appreciating that. Okay, it might take you two extra seconds to move the email out of your inbox over to the retention folder the first time you get it. But when you need it, you already know where it's going to be. You know, it's organized, you know, they're all in the right place because everyone's following the same process. So eventually it's actually going to take a lot less time. We just have to get through the transitions and in the transition, yeah, there's some more time right now because they have to go look back at those 50,000 emails. But once we get through that, this is going to speed things up for them. And that's true across the board with the type of innovations and changes that IRM programs introduce. Because the time people waste looking for stuff is huge.
So when you are gathering those champions, if we start at the top of this chain of people, gathering those champions to work with you and with the sponsor, that message of efficiency and potential optimization, risk reduction, that's all part of the business case of doing this at all. And you need to align that to your industry, to your company.
For heavily regulated industries, risk and compliance tend to carry more weight for less regulated industry. They're looking for cost savings. They're looking for hard cost savings often, and those are harder to find in the electronic space, but not impossible. They're very easy to find in the paper world. When you start adding up how much it costs to store paper and retrieve it and destroy it, ultimately or not destroy it. And all the hidden fees in the paper storage space, there's a business case there. But that is a key part of building your champions network. That range of senior people who are going to support this program as you move forward, because you are going to have to spend money, people are going to have to take time to learn new behaviors to start managing their information in a new way, and you need support for that.
All right, I think we should stop there. We will talk another time about the liaisons, the specialists, the hands on people when we get closer to implementation.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. That was a lot of information, Maura, but I do think it's important. I mean, you wouldn't be there or you wouldn't be doing this if you didn't have a sponsor. And if you can't collect enough champions, it's really not going to take off. In my opinion, that is, a working group is going to be key, especially with it. I think all I'm doing is just reiterating what you had said already, because there are components that are going to be automated as well as getting a governance committee because you might be talking about policy and rolling out policies into different groups. Having their feedback up front is going to be important. And then the Liais on moving things forward on a hands on basis, which I know you said we'll talk about. So thank you very much for joining us. If you have any questions, please send us an email at info at Trailblazer us. That's info at Trailblazer us. Thank you for listening, and please tune into our next episode.
[00:18:40] Speaker C: Thank you. Bye.
