Q1 is a great time to assess, resolve, and plan for growth and improvement. In the spirit of the New Year, we’ve identified four key “New Year, New Records” data governance resolutions to strive for in 2023.
1. Get a grip on unknown data and eliminate risk.
In our dynamic corporate landscape, each year companies might change internal data systems, migrate data to new locations or to the cloud, merge or acquire other companies, adjust policy relating to department shares, conduct redundancies or otherwise lose employees. Many offices have stacks of old laptops, hard drives, and decommissioned hardware because of these changes. Others have inactive or rarely touched directories, where copies of legacy data have been left behind or are rarely accessed. All of this data is largely unknown to your organization and can pose regulatory, security, and legal risk.
To supercharge your unknown data reconciliation, consider incorporating an information governance technology to aid in the assessment and disposal of your unknown data.
Commit to making 2023 the year you identify and reconcile unknown data.
2. Stop wasting time and money on redundant, obsolete, and trivial data.
As data volumes grow year-over-year, companies must continue to bare ever-growing storage costs associated with securely hosting and maintaining their corporate data. A study by Veritas tells us that 33% of an organization’s unstructured data could be ROT (redundant, obsolete, or trivial) data, meaning organizations that have not conducted a proper data cleanup could be wasting a significant amount of money on unnecessary data storage. In addition to the costs of storing this data, multiple copies and versions of the same document lead to process inefficiencies and inaccuracies for your organization. Information governance technologies can help identify, analyze, and discard ROT data. See our blog series on ROT data for more information.
Resolve to eliminate ROT data in 2023.
3. Enhance your records classification process with AI and machine learning.
Let’s face it: corporate data volumes are far too large to expect records managers to review and classify all corporate records unaided. Often, we turn to the end users creating the documents to help enact our records classification policies; however, end users have their own day-to-day responsibilities that take precedent. For these reasons and others, records classification can fall through the cracks – but it doesn’t have to.
Information governance platforms (like Rational Governance) enable organizations to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to automatically identify and classify business records and documents with privacy or legal implications – all in real time and without the need to burden end users.
Make 2023 the year you lean on AI to help with the gargantuan task of records classification.
4. Incorporate automation into your records management process.
Records retention processes are crucial to protecting your organization from unnecessary cost and risk, however, their undertaking can be manual, laborious, and time intensive – especially for organizations that have data in multiple operating and management systems (as most do).
The good news is that information governance technologies can help records managers automate the retention, deletion, and migration of data – effected in place, wherever documents may live, all from a single interface.
Let 2023 be the year of automation, for the benefit of record managers everywhere.
Wishing you a happy, healthy, and successful 2023 in life and in data governance, from all of us at Rational Enterprise.
