A Records Retention Schedule is a TOOL that EMPOWERS organizations to GOVERN and DEFENSIBLY DISPOSE of their information.
Records retention is first and foremost about complying with laws and regulations. However, a retention schedule, when properly developed and utilized, is not simply a tool that tells you how long you must keep (or when to destroy) your records, it is a blueprint that provides powerful insight into the information lifecycle and knowledge management capabilities of your company as a whole. It saves you money on storage and helps shape the way you curate your information enterprise-wide.
Records retention is first and foremost about complying with laws and regulations. However, a retention schedule, when properly developed and utilized, is not simply a tool that tells you how long you must keep (or when to destroy) your records, it is a blueprint that provides powerful insight into the information lifecycle and knowledge management capabilities of your company as a whole. It saves you money on storage and helps shape the way you curate your information enterprise-wide.
OUR RETENTION SCHEDULES:
Serve as a primary tool for ensuring records compliance with federal, state, local laws, regulations and business requirements
Identify business continuity records
Document all records categories, records formats, systems of record, retention requirements and data classifications
Can be updated automatically and integrate with IT infrastructure
Reach out to us today to schedule a free consultation at 323-413-7432
By Rafael Moscatel, Certified Information Privacy Manager (CIPM)
HEY BOSS, LOOKS LIKE PRIVACY IS KIND OF A BIG DEAL NOW
IAPP’s Privacy.Security.Risk. Conference 2019took place in Las Vegas over four days at the end of September and was attended by more than 2000 attendees hailing from all over the United States as well as a number of countries. The Fortune 500 was well represented but I also met a number of other astute organizations and took a tour of the industry’s big vendors on the showroom floor. Although I live tweeted the event I’d been waiting to share my complete thoughts until after I passed my CIPM exam, which I did just a couple days ago. More on that later…
THE FIELD OF INFORMATION MANAGEMENT CONFERENCES GROWS MORE CROWDED
First, as a Certified Records Manager (CRM) and Information Governance Professional (IGP), I’ve been to and spoke at my share of conferences touching on best practices for information management, privacy, security and content. What made this one different? Well, besides how well the conference was organized and the venue, The Cosmopolitan, almost all of the workshops were just first rate, chalk full of real take home targeted content and timely. The vast majority of the presenters were seasoned and even the first-timers made the grade. Here we are on the heels of one of the biggest new privacy laws, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and these sessions were speaking directly to its attendees on how to take specific action and plan for additional state directives. The education aspect and sales piece blended well, with technology complementing best practices and not the other way around. And the conference also left me with a lot of questions…
DO WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN?
I didn’t attend the training sessions on the first two days but made it to the opening keynote by Former Chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler who gave the audience a 30,000 foot view and shared thoughts from his new book, From Gutenberg to Google. A great way to set the tone for the conference and then it was followed up by Janelle Shane who focused on rudimentary examples of AI but didn’t really connect her topic that well to Privacy. Nonetheless, it was an interesting takeaway. However, my favorite keynote came in the form of a play by Sharyn Rothstein and directed by Seema Sueko entitled The Right To Be Forgotten. The play examined a concept that we find in Europe but which still hasn’t taken hold in the States. It follows the impact of a young man’s juvenile mistakes and how they follow him around as he gets older, impacting his reputation and his life.
IS THERE A PLACE FOR DIGITAL ETHICS?
I know a number of people who have been personally affected by the internet, both by their own doing and also unfairly, and so this was a terrific way of introducing these challenges to the audience. The problem was that the rest of the conference didn’t really touch on this topic because it was more focused on CCPA and the corporate aspects of privacy program implementation. That’s fine but it left me wondering if in the United States we’re really where we need to be on the privacy front. We seem to only be focused on the issue from a data protection standpoint rather than an ethical one, whereas GDPR and other parts of the world take a more holistic view. Yes, we have HIPAA and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) but it feels like many of our laws are still really about breaches and liability and not about the value of privacy.
The conundrum seems to be that while we’re moving, as industries, toward a business culture of privacy, our culture as a whole is moving in the opposite direction, away from arms length communication and behavior and towards oversharing and a lack of discrepancy. How do these two worlds exist? We know that hackers are now using personal information voluntarily shared with the world to design more sophisticated phishing attacks and deep fakes. We know that thieves use location and vacation information shared through social media to know when you’re home and plan robberies. And despite all of these controls supposedly put in place around the world, we continue to give more of our personal information away which ends up being held as ransome against our companies. Yes, we know we have to share this information to enjoy convenience and in many cases now, to simply survive and get daily errands completed, but it still feels like digital sisyphus. In the age of the personal brand, are there even any private people around anymore? What good is all of this data protection if society as a whole has given up on the ethics of privacy? Besides the play at the conference and some of the discussions around children’s privacy, I didn’t see much of a discussion here, but perhaps it wasn’t the venue. I recently had a discussion with noted Data Privacy Professor Anita Allen, who wrote the first casebook on privacy law, on these ethical aspects of privacy that will soon be available in my book, Tomorrow’s Jobs Today.
THE RISE OF THE MACHINES
So, full disclosure, I work with a few vendors in the privacy space but my thoughts on privacy vendors are not influenced by those relationships. I saw some amazing products at P.S.C.19. The products seem to be maturing and there is a lot of venture funding going into developing large enterprise scale platforms that do an A to Z job in addressing GDPR and CCPA. There are a couple big players in the business and the industry should be grateful for their sponsorship of conferences like this and generally moving the ball forward in terms of conversations around privacy.
What I’m seeing is a lot of enterprise product that is designed specifically for large organizations and a lot of file analysis, enterprise architecture and other similar companies trying to adapt their solutions to solve the problem. The problem is that the problem is constantly evolving and despite a pretty clear prescription in the CCPA legislation, I just don’t think one size fits all. Especially if you’re looking at a capital investment to check a compliance box that might be covered in a more strategic manner. Let me explain…
I had the pleasure of sitting with a team of folks from a major multinational and a peer and I questioned them about their approach to CCPA. It was pretty impressive. They had half a dozen folks attending the conference from a number of their offices. They had hired an industry leader to implement their program. So lots of investment, lots of buy in and it was proportional because their size makes them a natural target for a regulator. One of the more amusing partners in the group casually replied to me after I asked if they were ready by saying, “Yeah, but I’m going to be really pissed if we did all this work and don’t even get one request!” That’s of course what a lot of organizations realized following the GDPR where the flood of data subject requests turned out to be a trickle. So, despite their aversion to risk and likely thorough, appropriate strategy, I still wonder it it’s right for everybody. What about the companies with a smaller footprint and much smaller budget? Does it make sense to have an omnibus-like enterprise product, with dozens of API’s and infrastructure demands take over a section of your IT department?
WHAT ABOUT STRATEGY?
Here’s the truth about privacy programs and tools. There’s no silver bullet. Dumping a ton of money into an existing IT or Records Management program or hiring a team of half a dozen twenty-six year old MBA’s from one of the big four to turn your enterprise upside down (yes I’ve seen that) is not even close to a smart information governance strategy. Unfortunately this is the first time many organizations have had to take a close look at their information and records management programs. In many cases, especially with regulated industries, information management has played a role in meeting regulatory and audit demands but it wasn’t necessarily center stage the way it is now. Many companies have a retention schedule or policy but were probably over-retaining a lot of their data and not taking action on some of the other aspects of it like data classification until the privacy movement came along.
Data Protection Impact Assessment with CAPP using LogicGate
Privacy-centric records management is basically the ideal Information Governance project or initiative. That’s because to accomplish privacy goals, companies need to not simply revise policies, they need to holistically understand how those policies work with other areas of their business like data security and records management. Fortunately, a lot of the groundwork has already been in place at many organizations, specifically in Finance and Health, in order to integrate a privacy-centric framework. If it has been performed you should also complement it with a DPIA or Privacy Impact Assessment.
That said, how do you get the most value of the technology you implement? I think you do that by having the types of conversations that allow the best minds in your organization to become stakeIholders in the ultimate solution. Before you buy product, you need to survey your landscape. It may be that you need a privacy program and privacy protections for your consumers, employees and vendors but your data subject requests are not so cumbersome that you require an overhaul of your inventory and integrations.
Can you use an Enterprise Architecture and data mapping tool in concert with a separate data subject request tools instead of automating everything? Maybe. Consider the investment and time that might go into continuously monitoring a complicated, heavily API dependent and seldom-used privacy tool. Might that effort be better put into maintaining an EA tool that not only supports the mapping requirements of data privacy legislation but also supports other areas of the IT business? Don’t we want our organizations to be agile and be able to swap-in and swap-out tools as needed? Do we really want to tie an entire business process to one solution? Haven’t we learned anything from our legacy mainframe days? Remember how hard it was, and is, to untangle ourselves from those.
Mapping Data for GDPR with CAPP in Ardoq
I’m not saying that an enterprise-wide product isn’t right for large organizations with a lot of risk and endpoint exposure. I just believe that companies need to consider the process as a whole and take their time building these programs. Although California may serve as the baseline, we still don’t know what the rest of the States will do or what the future brings.
BEING A NEWLY MINTED CIPM
I can’t comment on the substance of the exam as I’m prohibited to by the agreement I signed. What I can say is that like most designations the value I find is not necessarily in the certification as much as the legwork and study necessary to achieve it. The reward is in the knowledge you acquire along the way, not just the medal you get at the finish line. If you check out the publicly available study materials and Body of Knowledge (BOK) available on the IAPP site you’ll see that it looks very much like the protocol of other information management organizations.
My belief though is that this BOK is evolved precisely because it’s privacy-centric. It covers many areas familiar to IG and Data Privacy disciplines but it is much more a holistic model and prescription than I’ve ever seen. It’s one of the reasons I’m so impressed with the IAPP.
THE RACE JOURNEY BEGINS
I came back from meeting with data privacy officials and business people in Brussels in 2018 knowing that Privacy was going to change the world. It’s one of the reasons I decided to engage more fully in it professionally. I’ll be spending more time talking about my journey towards privacy and speaking about the CCPA and related issues over the coming months and in my new book which should be available early next year. The concept of privacy is not just important for data protection and to check a compliance box, it’s important because it affects the lives of our colleagues, our friends, our children, our parents and pretty much everything around us. We need to not only protect our data but we need to value it and teach others to value theirs and that’s what I’m dedicated to.
I’m available for consulting opportunities and interviews and would love to discuss your corporate challenges. Feel free to contact me at rafael@capp-llc.com to schedule a free two-hour workshop or just give me a buzz at 323-413-7432.
Thirteenth in a series of in-depth interviews with innovators and leaders in the fields of Risk, Compliance and Information Governance across the globe. From the soon to be released book, “Tomorrow’s Jobs Today.”
Erick Swaine is a practice director for Mackenzie Ryan, a global talent recruiting firm. He specializes in Information Governance, AI and Analytics. He has placed thousands of job candidates across a wide spectrum of industries into mid-level to executive leadership positions and speaks frequently on their journeys and the mechanics of professional development. He received his Bachelor’s in Marketing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I spoke with him in July about today’s recruitment process, outsourcing strategies and the nuances of succession planning in the information age.
Erick, you were an early pioneer in helping employers understand the value and talent that information governance, AI, and analytics professionals offered when these disciplines were in their infancy. How has the demand for these emerging fields transformed recruiting in the job market?
There’s a lot to unpack there as it relates to tech itself, the demand for these emerging fields and how that has transformed over the years. I come from the industry myself. Prior to my current role I sold analytics software with built in compliance and document management capabilities. Our firm recognized value in analytics and was looking to build a technology practice. Mackenzie Ryan, which split off from Personify last year (both held under Mackenzie Ryan Holdings) didn’t have it when I came abroad so they went to their private equity VC partners and asked them, “Where are you investing as it relates to technology?” There was a resounding theme around electronically stored information. This was about a dozen years ago. At that point not everyone had a content management system. The players were SharePoint, OpenText, and OnBase and companies like Stellent, which was later picked up by Oracle, and Filenet, which was picked up by IBM. But they hadn’t penetrated all the markets. Early on the investment was in Content Management and overall repositories. It was really a soup-to-nuts storage of data, you know, manipulating workflows for all components of information management.
Overall, the human capital demand is there because of the efficiency that you can create by understanding your data. The newfound efficiency is driving advanced analytics and AI over the last five to six years, with massive amounts of investments around how we make decisions around these resources. This strategy requires the right talent.
As companies started to evolve, and you had social media come into play, around the same time, there were massive amounts of electronically stored data being created. Although storage kept getting cheaper and cheaper, there was a lot of regulation coming out requiring governance of data. Many of them looked at the discipline of Information Governance as a cost only, and then hopped over into advanced analytics. Over the last three or four years, they have moved more into Artificial Intelligence.
Yet, it’s all about making sense of the data that we’re already storing, and probably not defensibly disposing of. What the new technology has done for both large and small employers is really allow these companies to make data-driven decisions, and they drive those decisions based on a lot of historical legacy data. We noticed there are several companies that either used advanced analytics platforms or AI for internal knowledge management (to enhance institutional knowledge and train their people better), or they began aggregating and analyzing the data in order to develop additional revenue streams externally.
LEVERAGING A GDPR COMPLIANCE INVESTMENT FOR CCPA / PRIVACY BY DESIGN WORKSHOP
Part I – Join European attorneys and privacy compliance experts from Brussels based law firm Ethikos to learn how to leverage GDPR compliance investments for California’s new Consumer Privacy Act. In this presentation they’ll review key data protection concepts and privacy by design strategies already in place across the EU and explain how they’re now spreading throughout the United States. Find out what you need to know about the rules of transferring data and records internationally, PII records retention requirements, rules for managing content on customer facing websites and the impact of these new records management guidelines in contract negotiations.
SELECT THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW THE WHOLE PRESENTATION.
Part II – Meet solutions engineers from Active Navigation who will show you real world examples of how state of the art privacy software helps apply concepts and rules from GDPR and CCPA directly into an information lifecycle program. Learn about machine learning classification, consent validation, uncovering dark data and many more intricacies of implementing a privacy framework as part of your Information Governance roadmap.
Presenters
Miguel Mairlot, Ethikos Law Firm, Brussels
Miguel Mairlot is a trusted compliance expert, with significant breadth of experience across Europe. He provides clients with advice and support on all aspects of their compliance program. His areas of expertise include Asset Management, Wealth and Insurance businesses to cover cross-border regulatory issues, risk management, contractual documentation and product development, advising and influencing senior stakeholders at executive committee level, enabling them to meet their responsibilities across a range of group policies and local requirements, including MiFID II, GDPR, AML, ABC and Sanctions. Before Ethikos, Miguel has worked for prestigious international law firms and financial institutions as Head of Compliance. Miguel speaks English, French, Dutch and is a Certified Compliance Officer (Febelfin Academy) since 2013 and a Data Protection Officer. He has written and spoken widely on compliance and financial law topics and teaches at the Cooremans Institute. He also serves on the Editorial Board of “la Revue de Droit Bancaire et Financier”.
For almost 65 years, ARMA International has provided an exceptional level of educational value, professional resources and guidance to members of the information management field and business community. Those efforts have aided organizations in recognizing the importance of RIM/IG practitioners’ unique skillsets and helped incorporate them into their IT and governance programs. Indeed, both public and private entities benefit enormously from the mission of this organization, which much like its subject matter, has swiftly transformed to meet evolving civic and corporate demands. This rich history and dedication to its members, the business community and the public is exactly what I’d like to see continue in the coming decade. But my hope would also be for all of our membership, from fellows on down, to more enthusiastically apply the insight, lessons and strategies they’ve acquired over their careers to help ARMA in both achieving its long-term strategic plans and in exceeding its annual goals.
ARMA can lead the way by developing and fostering cutting edge information strategies that sit on the peaks of this new horizon and by driving the conversations that illuminate the valleys in between.
For the last twenty years I’ve held prominent leadership roles at both Fortune 500 companies and revered legal firms including Farmers Insurance, Paramount Pictures, Relativity Media and Kilpatrick Townsend. My work history has taken me from the trenches of service bureaus to the hot seat of penthouse boardrooms. Along the path I’ve attained a set of credentials beginning with a CRM from the Institute of Certified Records Managers in 2013, followed by an IGP from ARMA International in 2014. In June of 2016 ARMA International selected me for its Member Profile and in 2017 my team’s efforts at Farmers Insurance earned us ARMA’s coveted Excellence for an Organization Award. Because of all this I am eternally grateful for the opportunities which ARMA has provided along my career path. I’ve also been affiliated with the local ARMA-GLA chapter for the better part of the last decade and had the chance to see how powerful and influential a local chapter can be in bringing education and awareness to members of the organization as a whole. Those chapters need our resilient support and their leaders deserve most of the credit for keeping ARMA together all these years. They are the pillars of this intellectual edifice.
The next few years will see organizations in all industries balancing a world ripe with business opportunities with an evolving universe of risk and regulations. Technology, processes, people and the associations they subscribe to are being forced to adapt to this dynamic new digital landscape in both their personal and professional lives. ARMA can lead the way by developing and fostering cutting edge information strategies that sit on the peaks of this new horizon and by driving the conversations that illuminate the valleys in between.
As we dive into the second decade of the 21st century, I want ARMA to emerge as a defining voice in the global digital disruption and transformation discussion. By the same token, the professional development and success of ARMA’s members is central to that voice being heard loud and clear. The imminent need for effective information governance throughout the software and document lifecycle will likely broaden ARMA’s appeal to groups, professionals and verticals once unfamiliar with its offerings. In continuing to partner with and perhaps exploring mergers or acquisitions of like-minded organizations and businesses, ARMA can enhance its niche, enrich the knowledge offering and bolster its network.
We’re excited to share that pre-registration for the ARMA Conference 2019 opened January 1st as our final countdown announcement! This is the lowest price available and will only be offered until full registration opens. #getitnow#savenowhttps://t.co/3y9RSg9vKSpic.twitter.com/hmwutZHJ55
With the right choices, ARMA is poised to stand as a premier educational and professional service offering for this brave new world, in part by having established itself as the knowledge and resource mecca for Information Governance standards, but equally as a promoter and champion of its members, helping them connect to tangible digital transformation solutions. This means enabling and encouraging our colleagues to rise to the challenges that will shape and define the newest careers in the Information Age.
ARMA should also find new ways to play an instrumental role in highlighting and refining best practices and approaches around not just Enterprise Content Management but Big Data, Blockchain, AI, Privacy, the Internet of Things and Quantum Computing. It must pursue unique engagements with new corporate sponsors who are at the forefront of much of the change and innovation we’re witnessing. I would hope ARMA would want to have a valued and notable sponsorship level presence at the major technology conferences in the coming years including BoxWorks and BlackHat which are hungry for our narrative and talent. ARMA must strive to remain platform agnostic but must also accept the realities of dominant technologies and embrace their significance.
The association should work closely with the legal, regulatory and ethical bodies and communities that study the impact of digital transformations on businesses as well as the individual in society. This need is evidenced by the increase in privacy regulations and laws recently passed in the EU and in the United States. Building on these relationships will lend credibility to our certifications and designations. That credibility should in turn be used by ARMA leaders and members to participate in media commentary on newsworthy information management events and issues. ARMA should strive to have those perspectives sourced by popular media and journalists alike, thus bringing further recognition to the organization and marketing its relevance. ARMA should act to elevate its experienced speakers as well as new disruptive voices. Our expertise is newsworthy and needs to be heard!
The next few years really are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to seize on this demand for Information Governance solutions and tap the potential of the professional community that supports it. My hope is that community will be the people that love and celebrate ARMA.
Rafael Moscatel, CRM, IGP, is the Managing Director of Compliance and Privacy Partners, LLC. Reach him at 323-413-7432, follow him on Twitter at @rafael_moscatel or visit http://www.capp-llc.com
Building a Bridge Between Strategy and Governance Aboard the IT Enterprise – An Interview with Kevin Gray, CIO of the City of Burbank
Eleventh in a series of in-depth interviews with innovators and leaders in the fields of Risk, Compliance and Information Governance across the globe.
Kevin Gray is the Chief Information Officer for the City of Burbank, leading an IT department responsible for administrative and network management, geographic information systems and technical services for more than 1400 city employees across 15 departments. Before assuming this role he served as VP of Global Media and IT for Viacom, one of the world’s premier entertainment companies, overseeing an international team located across six continents. He received his Bachelor of Science from California State University, Long Beach and is a certified Scrum Master and PMP. I spoke with him over lunch this May about aligning governance with business strategy, balancing risks and opportunities in AI and his insights on career growth.
Kevin, you began your career path at Orion Pictures administering Unix systems and then directed data center ops for DreamWorks. How did this early hands-on experience with application design and DB administration prepare you for future IT leadership positions at Viacom and ultimately the CIO role with the City of Burbank?
Well I started out on a service desk actually, really at the entry levels in IT, and I’ve been lucky to have grown up through all aspects of it. I think climbing that ladder one rung at a time definitely helped give me a clear vision to see across all the disciplines of technology. It enabled me to see the forest through the trees, the big picture, gave me the ability to design operations, develop strategy… and equipped me with a vision to incorporate it all. And now I can more thoughtfully pull together a clear plan for how to run an organization, understand how to innovate, how to drive change through both a specific business unit or an organization. Experience is what best prepared me to lead.
One of your focal points has always been the importance of properly aligning IT governance with an organization’s business strategy. What are some of the practical ways IT teams accomplish this goal and how critical is the relationship building component that accompanies that synchronicity?
I think the most practical way to accomplish this is to focus on the people. Focus on the people developing the strategy and look at how their business is trying to implement it, because the most important thing is to be in alignment with the shared goal, in alignment with the people you’re partnering with. You have to be a true partner with the business. And that has to be the focus, not the technology. The technology is the secondary piece. Technology is what you use to try to find the solution for the business problems that they’re trying to solve. And those business problems don’t always stay the same, they change. They change based on economic conditions, they change based on market conditions, they may change based on who might be occupying the seat that you’re trying to partner with.
So, you have to stay close and you have to stay connected. That allows you to stay aligned. Then you can figure out the solutions that are going to help solve that business problem. You have to be agile. You have to be able to switch directions. When the business switches direction, you have to be able to switch direction. And I think too many times, IT organizations, they don’t stay connected. They believe that they’re trying to solve this business strategy, that they’re trying to solve the business’ problems. But then the business problems change, the strategies change, and they’re suddenly not connected and eventually they’re heading down the wrong direction for another three to six months, which is a lifetime in technology.
Read the entire interview and more in my new book on leadership in the information age, Tomorrow’s Jobs Today.
I’ve attended and spoken at many different “information management” conferences over the years and each has their strengths and weaknesses. But I’m especially excited to speak at DSF ’19 this year, sponsored by companies like OpenText, Quadient, Adobe, PitneyBowes and Doculabs. Why am I so thrilled? Besides the fact that I get to share my thoughts and experiences for the first time representing Compliance & Privacy Partners, this conference is practitioner driven, with a stellar board of advisors that has spent time with its presenters, making sure the content fits the program tracks AND elevates the conversation.
At the very heart of all the buzz surrounding “big data and artificial intelligence (AI) lives a universal truth- Information is the critical asset of every organization. Information flows through people and applications at such a rapid pace that it demands effective management. Enterprises are flying blind if they don’t have an information management strategy. It is impossible to understand customer needs and improve their experiences without the right information feeding decision making systems. Without proper management of info, employee engagement is doomed. The bottom line is that effective information management will dictate critical decisions for both internal and external facing processes that bring the intersection of employees and customers into context. –David Mario Smith in the latest Document Strategy Magazine
How to build and automate your Information Governance strategy using the right policies, technology, and stakeholders
How to recognize the right collaboration opportunities and strategically partner on the projects most likely to support and advance your agenda
What approaches to take when introducing your plans to senior leadership and how to effectively manage the optics around your contributions to your company’s bottom line
Tickets may be available if you act now but the event is quickly selling out. You can learn more here.
Strengthening Protections and Embracing Connections – An Interview with Douglas C. Williams of Williams Data Management
Tenth in a series of in-depth interviews with innovators and leaders in the fields of Risk, Compliance and Information Governance across the globe.
Douglas C. Williams is CEO of Williams Data Management and Chairman of the Board for the Vernon Chamber of Commerce. He has over thirty years of experience helping Fortune 500 clients with their document storage, destruction and data security needs. I had an opportunity to sit down with him earlier this year in Los Angeles and collect his thoughts on data protection, business continuity, civic responsibility and professional growth.
Doug, your family has been involved in the Records and Data Management business for the better part of a century and you’ve seen a lot of players come and go. How do small businesses like Williams remain resilient in the disruptive world of digital transformation, and what should executives be thinking about in terms of their long-term information management strategies?
Commercial Records Management, the holistic approach at 50,000’, includes the digital component, as well as the legacy hard copy component. Our transition in the early 1980s into the commercial records center business from industrial freight warehousing and distribution, witnessed similar disruptions. Those disruptions had mostly to do with the shift to the service economy from the industrial/manufacturing economy. Our client base includes enterprise size businesses as well as mid-size businesses and SMBs. Executives in charge of information assets need to recognize the holistic scope of those information assets, whether they be structured or unstructured, and apply the information governance and regulatory guidelines to each equally. Knowing that digital technologies will change at light-speed, CEOs and their executive teams need to be fully knowledgeable and ready for changes in forensic discovery and know the impact of retention milestones for each type of information asset. We all know that text messages, email, and all social media posts have a permanent residency somewhere to be found. Each and every business, large or small, has to accept a contingent liability regarding the action or inaction of maintaining a strict policy regarding their information management policies – irrespective of the resident media.
In 2015, you were interviewed by Adam Burroughs of Smart Business Los Angeles and highlighted a growing alarm over data breaches. Here we are just a few years later and data protection is a daily news flash. With California recently passing the California Consumer Privacy Act, do you still feel the majority of organizations are taking security and privacy for granted or are you now starting to see a trend toward proactive management of data?
I do. They are taking for granted it won’t happen to them, and if it does, they are insured. But guess what, that is delusional. Again, the proactive plan requires a holistic approach to information management. The IT department knows how to protect the data, but typically do not know why, i.e., what are the governing rules for each type of data. That is the province of the CIO or the Director of Information Governance, or the General Counsel if an enterprise size firm. The breaches in the headlines are preventable; however, because of human errors in social media, emails, texts, data sharing, lack of encryption and the like, entryways into personal information data sets are available. In our case at Williams Data Management, because we are social media users, we installed front end data intrusion software, pioneered and patented by Oasis Technologies, known as TITAN, which blocks over 500,000 intrusions attempts per week from getting into our networks.
Read the entire interview and more in my new book on leadership in the information age, Tomorrow’s Jobs Today.
Marketing the Moving Targets of Digital Transformations – An Interview with Dux Raymond Sy of AvePoint
Tenth in a series of in-depth interviews with innovators and leaders in the fields of Risk, Compliance and Information Governance across the globe.
Dux Raymond Sy is the Chief Marketing Officer of Avepoint® and has successfully driven business and digital transformation initiatives for commercial, educational and public sector organizations across the globe. He’s a Microsoft Regional Director (RD), a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and has authored numerous books, articles and whitepapers on IT and business process strategy. He received his Bachelor of Science from Southern Polytechnic University in Telecommunications Engineering. I interviewed him recently about the unique challenges of marketing digital products and services, the future of cloud computing, O365 and the shifting IT career landscape.
Dux, Avepoint specializes in leveraging the breadth of Microsoft technologies including SharePoint and Office 365 to help companies migrate and manage their cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments. There are some trend reports indicating a few enterprises have shifted back toward hybrid stacks after overextending themselves in the cloud. Do you believe most enterprises eventually will evolve, or are there factors such as data protection that will always prevent full cloud adoption for certain entities?
When it comes to enterprise technology, we rarely move backwards. The cloud’s cost, scale, efficiency access, and yes, even security advantages, are too great for on-premises or hybrid infrastructures to prevail long-term. What I will say is the transformation will take much longer than the advertising of cloud providers would have you believe. Most organizations are not all-in the cloud today. We did a study in 2017 that showed about 70 percent of organizations were still in hybrid architectures. We sponsored a study with AIIM this year that showed 1 in 3 organizations is maintaining at least 2 versions of SharePoint. Attitudes towards the cloud have changed, now the conversation is mainly focused on how to get there rather than the why.
Lastly, there are capabilities that the cloud offers that cannot be delivered on-premises s. Cloud-based advanced services, like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analytics, open new opportunities for technical teams to drive business value.
How is Infrastructure, Platform and Software-as-a-Service changing the organizational hierarchy of IT departments, reporting structures and collaborative teams? Are companies beginning to hire more administrators and get along with fewer developers, architects and support staff? Where will the best IT jobs be in the next few years at the current pace?
This is a great question! My colleague Hunter Willis recent wrote a piece about this that sparked a huge debate on Twitter. What we have found is that people and organizations evolve more slowly than the technology. Right now, most organizations are just shifting on-premises roles to the cloud. So if you were the SharePoint admin or the Exchange admin, you are now the SharePoint Online admin or Exchange Online admin. But what about applications that don’t exist on-premises ? Who owns PowerApps? This also ignores the advanced workloads and connections between apps that exist in the cloud. What you do in Microsoft Teams impacts your Exchange and vice versa. What organizations need, and we haven’t seen yet, is an Office 365 admin that truly owns the platform and looks at these platform wide issues. If were seeing some of these issues just within Office 365, imagine what we will see as multi-cloud architectures become more popular. The best IT jobs in the next few years will be business enablers who have a love of learning. You will need to be agile in the era of tech intensity.
Read the entire interview and more in my new book on leadership in the information age, Tomorrow’s Jobs Today.
Are CFO’s finally ready to heed the advice of their Chief Data Officers and begin adding information assets to the balance sheet?
Although the commonly used quote “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” is regularly and erroneously misattributed to Victor Hugo, originating from his account of the French coup d’état of 1851 that brought Napoleon III to power, I feel it’s almost appropriate for Douglas B. Laney’s passionate argument on Infonomics. It’s an idea he’s been meticulously developing and arguing for almost two decades and has at last fully articulated in his latest book published by Taylor & Francis entitled Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information As An Asset For Competitive Advantage. Laney previously published his thoughts on Infonomics in Forbes back in 2012.
This brilliantly researched book, supported by industry giant Gartner, is steeped in both a mastery of information technology as well as economics, in particular accounting methodology and complementing business disciplines that range from supply chain economics to compliance frameworks.
Laney, with brevity and unfailing pragmatism, weaves his impressive understanding of the business of information, it’s flow and it’s enormous potential into a convincing pleading that I believe is a must read for not just the aspiring digerati, but any CFO, Chief Data Officer or executive hoping to survive and thrive in the Information Age.
Navigating The Global Digital Economy – An Interview with April Dmytrenko, CRM, FAI
Seventh in a series of in-depth interviews with innovators and leaders in the fields of Risk, Compliance and Information Governance across the globe.
April Dmytrenko, CRM, FAI is a recognized thought leader in the field of information management, governance, compliance, and protection. As both a practitioner and consultant, she works with global organizations on key initiatives and best practice approaches for the enterprise; developing sustainable solutions; integrating legally compliant programs focused on information/digital assets; motivating and facilitating multi-disciplined groups to collaborate on achievable goals; and building strategic partnerships with internal and external teams. She serves on industry action committees and governing and editorial boards, and is an active industry speaker, trainer, and author. I had the pleasure of sitting down with April this September to discuss privacy, the role of industry associations and key concerns for leaders navigating the global digital economy.
April, almost five years ago I asked what the next big frontier would be for those of us managing data, and more importantly where the jobs would be. You wisely predicted that privacy would be on the horizon. Well we now have a number of legislatures drafting regulations and CPO positions can’t seem to be filled quickly enough. Do you believe there is still time to enter this emerging field and make an impact?
Right now we are experiencing an amazing transformation of the business environment based on many things but particularly the evolution of technology and the global digital economy. It is indeed an exciting time but we are acutely “headline news” aware of the impacts of compromised data security and privacy, including financial impact on brand and reputation, litigation, and the overall burden and distraction on the business. The exponential growth rate of incidents of data theft, damage, loss or inadvertent disclosure continues to expand not only in frequency but scope, and complexity. While privacy concerns gained attention over 100 years ago, and became topical about 15 years ago, it is still truly in an infancy state. Privacy offers IG professionals a rich and important opportunity to expand their leadership or advisory role in maturing a unified approach to protection, compliance with laws and regulations, and incident response and recovery.
Courtesy ARMA International
In your role as a fellow of ARMA International, you’ve helped to connect organizations with practitioners who truly understand the discipline and benefits of Information Governance. How has this evolved over the years and what steps do you think organizations like ARMA and the ICRM need to keep taking to remain relevant?
This is a great question as the core IG professional organizations have been dealing with an identity crisis for some time, and still struggle to have a clear and concise “elevator speech” on mission and value. IG, while it has a wide breath, has many in the industry confused, and still is a term that does not universally resonate with senior management. These associations have tremendous value and passionate support but numbers speak volumes and membership and conference attendance have been decreasing for years. We are seeing the technology vendor market taking over a leadership role and may serve as the new defining force in setting direction and guiding the industry – self-serving yes but it could be what is needed going forward. I am not concerned about relevance as it will continue to be all about information and technology, and the management, protection and leveraging of information asset. While the role of a traditional Records Manager may not continue to be relevant, I don’t find it concerning – the relevance is in the work and it evolves…
Read the entire interview and more in my new book on leadership in the information age, Tomorrow’s Jobs Today.
Using Blockchain for the Common Good – An Interview with Ashish Gadnis of BanQu
Sixth in a series of in-depth interviews with innovators and leaders in the fields of Risk, Compliance and Information Governance across the globe.
Ashish Gadnis is CEO of BanQu, Inc. and a recognized thought leader in the blockchain community. He chairs the Financial Inclusion Working Committee for the Wall Street Blockchain Alliance and travels the world explaining how this revolutionary new technology is transforming the way we think about supply chain economics. He holds an MBA from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management and graduated from the Global Leadership and Public Policy program at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. I spoke with him this July about blockchain, business administration and professional development.
Ashish, you recently spoke at the MER conference where the theme was “Records for Humanity,” how data governance impacts the human condition. And your company, BanQu, offers a unique solution to the challenge of extreme poverty by leveraging blockchain. With BanQu, people ensure their economic identity with an immutable record of their transactions in a system benefiting the entire supply chain. But how exactly do you, your clients and big brands set about prioritizing and realizing these goals?
Over the last two and a half years we’ve realized that 2.7 billion people, that includes refugees displaced and those in extreme poverty zones, participate in some sort of a supply chain. That can mean you’re the poorest farmer in Congo growing coffee, cacao or shea butter, you know, the ingredients that go into cosmetics, and your contributions show up in brands like eight dollar lattes and expensive body lotions. And in examining this, we realized that that current models for getting people out of poverty have failed. Those models have failed because they look at the ability to help people out of poverty separate from enabling people in poverty to participate in the supply chain. And so we actually took the other route. And nobody had ever done it. We said, “What if the people who are absolutely in that last mile, if they get to equally participate?” Then the value for the brand is suddenly more relevant.
Let’s use a simple example. If you’re buying cacao in Ghana and you’re a large chocolate company, there’s a good chance today that your last mile farmers are extremely poor and also invisible. No matter much traceability, transparency or fair trade you implement, until and unless that farmer can participate in his data, to know for example “I’m selling 40 kilos every other week to this big brand,” then that farmer will continue to live in poverty. And this is kind of a long answer, but the detail is important because that poor farmer today has everything stacked against him or her, especially if conditions are so rough. I was just in Zambia a week and a half ago and I saw firsthand some of this problem, which was that women farmers have to borrow at a higher price point.
Women farmers are always at the short end of the stick because they’re not allowed in many cases to prove their history. So what happens if you happen to be selling 40 kilos upstream and there are seven middlemen… after I sell my coffee… somebody picks it up, then brings it to somebody else, the next one goes to the warehouse and eventually you’ve lost the ability to track. And while the internet has come to people in poverty it hasn’t pulled people out of extreme poverty permanently. There’s mobile money, there’s big data, AI, etc., but none of those models actually have ever allowed that mother, that farmer, to participate equally.
When I say participate equally, it’s very basic. To me participate equally means that one, she has a physical (stored digitally) copy of that transaction that nobody can ever steal or manipulate. Two, she has the ability to prove her transaction history which legitimizes her existence in that supply chain. And three, it allows her to now leverage that data in a way that reduces her cost of borrowing. It allows her to be portable. That’s how we decided to look at blockchain and nobody in the world has ever done this. People keep talking about how they’re going to use blockchain for good and we’re the only ones doing it everyday, taking a commercial approach while being simultaneously deeply purpose driven. We started a for profit, for purpose software company and now the largest brands are coming to us because it solves two sides of the problem for them. One side is that the supply chain now becomes more cost effective and efficient. They get better visibility into the supply chain in terms of quality, market access and forecasting which enables an ecosystem for crop insurance, climate protection, education. And the other side of the coin is now they can start addressing issues like gender equality, labor rights and other important issues.
Read the entire interview and more in my new book on leadership in the information age, Tomorrow’s Jobs Today.
I can’t comment on the substance of the exam as I’m prohibited to by the agreement I signed. What I can say is that like most designations the value I find is not necessarily in the certification as much as the legwork and study necessary to achieve it. The reward is in the knowledge you acquire along the way, not just the medal you get at the finish line. If you check out the publicly available study materials and Body of Knowledge (BOK) available on the IAPP site you’ll see that it looks very much like the protocol of other information management organizations.
