[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, thank you for joining us. This is what Counts, a podcast created by Trailblazer Consulting. This is our 100th episode here. As always, we've highlighted proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries, and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company. We share our experience solving information management challenges like creating and implementing records retention schedule, creating an asset data hierarchy, or helping with email management. This is Lee, and in this episode, Mora and I recap some of the past 99 episodes.
Anyway, Maura, this is, this is a good one. Like this is celebratory. Right. We've gone from a pre assessment stage, like the early beginning of our episodes. Right. I'm just going to kind of run through them real quick.
We've done a pre assessment. You know, how do we, how do clients find us? How do we find a client? What do they ask us? When in the beginning, from a consulting perspective, how can we help them? How can, how can we help them? Plain and simple, to the assessment stage. One of our highest rated listened to episodes is about creating interview questions. And it still gets hits to this day, which is good because it gets to the point of what it is you're trying to find out from an information governance perspective. How do you get people to talk about it? When you ask people about information governance, I think they stutter.
I think they talk about records management and as we've always said, it goes to boxes that are in storage somewhere. Right. And. Or they go to data privacy. Well, let's hook, let's hook on that one. Because people kind of understand data privacy a little bit more and we know that information governance is a plethora of things. But the questions that we get people to talk about are just that. We ask questions to get people to talk about what they do on a daily basis because that's what's important. How do they get their job done? What comes in that triggers their job and what goes out when they finish their day, for instance.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: I agree.
I'm glad you brought that up. That our questionnaire, our interview questions episode, which was very early in our journey here to get to 100, is one of still the most popular episodes. And, and that's because I think you're right.
Faced with, oh my goodness, I have to do information governance for my company, it's hard to know where to start.
A lot of people, when we first interview them in an assessment, their first answer is, I don't have any records and that's somebody else's job. And that's Potentially true, but unlikely. More and more unlikely in this electronic information age than it was when you did have all hard copies in file rooms, which many of our listeners may not have ever seen. A file room with dense shelving or something else. So the, that evolution that has taken place in the last 15, 20 years is huge. Now everybody has to manage information. Everybody in a company is managing information one way or another. And the structure that your information governance program together with your IT department can put in place makes it easier or harder for people to manage the company's information, makes it easier or harder for people to find the information that they need. And it makes it easier or harder for the company to protect the information that it needs to run its business.
And so those questions where we don't, since we always just got the answer of I don't have any records. What we have had a lot more luck with, I think is when we ask people to talk about their jobs, like you said, so what are you responsible for and how do you do that job? Do you need information to do it? Okay, where does the information come from? And then what do you do with it? Do you change it? Do you add to it? Do you store it somewhere? Do you pass it on?
Those questions people get more excited about and then they're also, they get really excited when they can tell us what goes wrong. Well, I send it to that department, but then when I have to check something, they can't ever find it. So I always keep a copy or I don't know where it goes next. I just, I send it to this mailbox that doesn't belong to anybody and I don't know if anything happens and I have to follow up with, you know, every, I have to follow up with sue because she's the only one who gets things done every time something like that. We get a lot of those stories and I think they are, they are often the most like interesting insights into how a company works is when you talk about how the information flow happens or doesn't.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: And that was good because that was a good way to describe the next section that we did some podcast episodes about which was findings. We ran into surprises.
We found a number of different things in that area. We had follow up questions like you said, you had to ask sue about this and that. So after that we went into an analysis phase here we listed some of the risks, the emerging themes that we found from these assessments that we got from people's conversations, the strength, strengths, weaknesses and so forth.
Recommendations from us came next. We talked about our framework. We're in our recent episodes. We're covering our framework again because it's so important and it does cover all program elements when it comes to information governance. Implementing information governance from a recommendations perspective. Um, we covered. Here's a roadmap that you could follow to start putting pieces in place in your organization. What are the phases?
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I like that. I like. I'm gonna. I'm just interrupting because the. The analysis step is really important. When you look at the raw data that comes out of the interviews, you don't wanna just jump on the first thing. You wanna do the analysis and figure out where's the biggest risk, where's the biggest value for your organization.
And then we get to the roadmap, and it's a balancing act because nobody can address every single information governance issue or opportunity. At the same time, there's not enough resources, there's not enough money, and people can't handle that level of change.
You get change fatigue. So the roadmap reflects the priorities of your organization and it came out of. It comes out of that analysis of the findings of what did people say was the biggest risk. If one person said, this is a huge pain for me, but everybody else was like, that's fine, it's just him. Or, yeah, that is a big problem for that world, that part of our business, but it's a small part of our business. So we're willing to put up with that pain because we have to deal with this issue, which is. Has an impact on a bigger area of our business. And we should do that first. Like the roadmap ends up reflecting those priorities. I think.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: I think you're absolutely right. And you again, covered a couple of pieces that moved us into the next arc of our podcast series, which was implementation. And that was about project planning and resources. And change management was a big component of that. We had some guest speakers that talked about change management and training, that we brought up a number of different tools that could be used.
How do you create a champion network? How do you use your liaisons? What's your governance look like when it comes to information governance?
How do you do some of these things that are important to information governance, like the policies? How do you create a policy? How do you create a records retention schedule? We didn't go into great detail, but we did talk about it.
And what I'm getting at is this whole podcast series. The whole thing has really been from start to finish, how can you be a information governance consultant? And all of the specific pieces associated with it, sure, you could use it, I could use it as a training course. But at the same time we're really getting people to listen to different pieces of it and increase what they know at their organization or what they can use at their organization.
[00:09:36] Speaker B: Right. So how to be your own information governance consultant in your organization.
I agree. I think looking back from where we started and how we tried those first couple of episodes, we were trying to fit everything in as, just pile as much information into one episode as we could. And they were hard to listen to.
Hard. Hard. Some, some, some folks were so bad we didn't even publish them. But the.
I think we've gotten to a good rhythm of relating the concepts, the framework, these are the steps to an information governance program. And we're not done yet because we haven't really talked about compliance monitoring at all. And there's some more deep dives to do. So don't worry, this hundredth episode is not our last but the.
That, that high level conceptual piece supporting it with like jumping into this is what we saw at a client and we, this is how they reacted and this is how we reacted. And here was what happened next because these concepts aren't theoretical. They might have started out from studying, you know, the principles of information management, the principles of records management, principles of archives and library science, but, and even. And, and in addition principles of managing a business and, and complying with laws and regulations and, and being efficient and being profitable. And all of those pieces come together because I think I have said before, nobody is doing records management for records management's sake. You are in a business to make money or provide a service or support an infrastructure or whatever you're mission is and you need information to do that. And you need information to demonstrate that you've done things in accordance with the applicable laws and regulations and you need information to, to support shared transactions and decisions and, and, and keep track of what's happening.
So all of those concepts have to come together in a practical way to actually manage the information in your business every day. And that's what we've been trying to do with our, our podcast series. And I think we've, I think we've made some good. I hope we've done some good.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: I think we have. And just like our introduction and I mentioned records retention schedule creating that, we've talked about asset data hierarchy as well, what need there. And we've definitely referred to email management and the help we can provide there and we hope that that helps individuals as well.
[00:12:44] Speaker B: Oh, the email management email. I don't know where, I don't know where that's headed next, but it's not going away. It's still out there causing trouble.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: Well, I was just going through the progression of steps and I realized that I didn't hit each one of the one items that I mentioned in our in our introduction to our podcast. So I wanted to make sure I covered that. Anyway, I think it's a great job. So thank you. Maura, great job getting to our 100th episode.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: Thank you, Lee, for getting to our 100 episode and thank you listeners for hanging in with us.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Stay tuned. There's more to come.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: If you have any questions, please send us an email at
[email protected] or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com. Thank you for listening and please tune in to our next episode. Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network. As always, we appreciate you, the listeners. Special thanks goes to Jason Blake who created our music.
