[00:00:00] Speaker A: Training versus automation on any part of an IG program.
Welcome to the Lightning round of Information Governance. We will discuss how do you would we did we should you Over a variety of interesting topics.
Hello and welcome to what Counts. Every organization hides a story in their data. This is a podcast that digs into the information governance people inherit, ignore and discover too late. I'm Lee and as always, my co host Maura Dunn is with me. More. This idea of information governance and trying to implement any piece of it manually or automated, how, how do you, what direction you want to go on this?
[00:00:44] Speaker B: So I've been thinking about this a lot lately because we've been doing this a long time and when we started doing information governance, a lot of things were still in paper.
And the way that you, that you got people to follow the rules was training everybody. Even when we moved from paper to electronic, it was really just an electronic version of paper documents and file shares instead of paper documents and folders.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: And we were training, training and retraining,
[00:01:18] Speaker B: training, training and retraining.
And our clients expected and accepted that because a lot of our clients were.
I had one client anyway, who said, I believe in people, not process.
And I said, I believe in process. You need people, but the process is where you get consistency.
And if you look at things like the cmmi, all the maturity models that are out there, that level one doesn't mean you aren't going to be able to get the thing done and even that you can get it done well, but it means you are depending on individual people to put forth heroic efforts and get it all right.
And everybody has to work together to get it right.
And that works for a short time. And it works more when people like believe in a cause as opposed to I just need to do the, the, the filing correctly. Very few people are super excited about filing things correctly. I don't know that I've met any in all my whole career. Including me.
[00:02:26] Speaker A: Right. Yet, yet. We probably both started there.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: I started there and I didn't enjoy it at all.
So, so, but that's what training. If you depend on manual process and you spend time, you know, documenting the process and training everybody on the steps and.
But you're going to pretty quickly run into. I'll get to that later. I'll file that tomorrow. Oh, the next project started. I'll work on that later. I'll work on that next week. Oh, Bob's out and I need to get his approval on something. I'm going to skip him and go to Lee and get Lee to answer this question. And then I'll go back, I'll circle back to Bob, I'll write a memo, I'll make sure it's okay. But I don't ever do that. Or rarely, rarely does it ever get done. So. So training, low cost, low barrier to entry. And if you have a small group and they're really dedicated, then okay. And also circling back to our risk discussion. If your risk is low because you're a new company, you're a small company, your records are not very complex, you're not heavily regulated, you don't have a high litigation profile, you don't really have a need to go back to information is. What that kind of comes down to is you need the information to get the job done, and then you're kind of done with it. You might keep it because you have a retention schedule, a basic one that says keep it for tax purposes for seven years or something, which.
Which a lot of people think applies to everything, but it does apply to taxes, usually.
So then your risk is low and the cost of doing it that way is low. And that's probably the right answer.
But if you are a major company that has offices in multiple locations around the world and is in a heavily regulated industry, so you're Exxon, then you're going to look at automation because the risk of everybody in your company doing things a little bit differently, resulting in different outcomes and different management of your information, the cost of that is high. If you get. If anything happens, if you have an accident, if you have an explosion, if you have a big litigation and your records are in.
I'm not going to just say they're all bad, but they are inconsistent and they bring up questions because you let everybody do what they wanted. You counted on everybody to do the right thing. And how many times have we heard that? Not at Exxon, but at smaller companies that have grown through acquisition. And they're like the people who were there before they knew what they were doing. We just let them keep doing it. We count on them to know what they're doing. Or we've got, you know, the engineers have been here for 80 years. Well, maybe not 80, but 30 years at a big infrastructure organization, a big plant, a big university. They know what they're doing.
They might. I'm not saying that individual people don't know what they're doing in their jobs. But you as a company, you have no idea what they're doing. And when you come up to a point where you have to prove it to someone, you can't find, you can't find the records because you don't know what anybody did with them. You don't know how they got created. You don't know where they got stored.
And you can be. And you're going to be attacked on that.
You're going to be attacked on. Was your policy right? Did you have a policy that said keep them? Well, we've seen an example where the policies, the policies, yeah. Eventually we found a policy that said keep them. But it wasn't the first policy that you looked at. The first policy didn't say that you had to go find each individual policy that said this is how you do this job and, and this is how you should keep the records. And that was not immediately obvious.
And so the first go round of questions that that organization had to answer was, here we go.
And the regulator said, not good enough. Looks like you destroyed things on purpose or at worst, or you didn't care, at best.
And then even once we found the policies that said yes, we were supposed to keep everything, they couldn't find the records. They went back 50 years. They were in paper, they were organized in a lot of different ways. They were spread across a very large geography and they couldn't find them. And they then was all hands on deck, pull everybody together. Everybody's going through boxes 24 7.
It was chaos.
It was chaos and it was on the news. That's not what you want. That's not what you want.
So in that case, automation would have been a better answer and was ultimately where they headed. But the, the cost is huge. The cost is huge to implement automation on that scale, but the risk is also huge if you don't.
So that's my, that's my, my pitch here. Automation is not for everyone in every situation.
But your risk profile should drive, it
[00:07:43] Speaker A: should drive automating the weld on a pipe for a big pipeline.
[00:07:52] Speaker B: Automating, doing the weld.
[00:07:54] Speaker A: Right.
Or having people who are certified doing the weld.
[00:08:01] Speaker B: Yes.
So that is outside of our world, in the information world. The part that we need to understand is how do you document that the weld was done correctly and how do you save that information?
And that got you to the, to the materials traceability elements in pipeline construction. Where did this piece of pipe come from? What happened to it over its lifetime? Was it sitting in a yard for three years, getting rusty?
How did you test it to make sure that it was safe when you put it in the ground?
Did it get inspected? And where's the inspection that says the weld was properly installed. Like, that's the information governance side of that problem, of a missing weld that could cause a.
That could cause a failure, a catastrophic failure.
The IG side of it is we need a process.
We need a policy that says that we inspect pipe from start to finish.
And we need a process that proves that we did it. A process that captures the records that prove that we did it.
[00:09:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:10] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: Training versus automation is an important element of building a program, but it comes from the foundation of risk assessment and policy.
[00:09:25] Speaker A: If you have any questions, send us an email. Really fooailblazer us, please.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: Please ask us questions. We love talking about this. We don't love filing, but we love talking about IG.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: Or find us on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com or on the Microsoft Store, the Apple Store, or Google Play.
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[00:10:09] Speaker B: All right, thanks everyone. See you soon.
