William McKnight of McKnight Consulting recently wrote an article about Data Governance where he states that “Data governance has become an overused term in our industry.” The article was very good. I am only going to concentrate on a snippet. He identifies that data governance function can refer to any or all of:
- Setting the direction of master data management efforts;
- Deciding who in the organization will create, approve, enforce and monitor data; and
- Determining who and what is involved in the workflow of data.
What I would like you to imagine is applying this to unstructured content. It could then read:
- Setting the direction of master ‘unstructured content’ management efforts;
- Deciding who in the organization will create, approve, enforce, and monitor unstructured content; and
- Determining what and what is involved in the workflow of unstructured content.
Now, being in the metadata generation, classification, and taxonomy business I would be hard pressed to find an organization that has incorporated those bullets as it applies to unstructured content. Yet statistics say that 80% of corporate information is unstructured (IDC). This should be an imperative for any organization. But from experience sadly it isn’t.
Do you manage unstructured content in areas such as search, records management, text analytics, data privacy/confidential information protection, and social collaboration from an over arching unstructured information governance approach? Or perhaps, just pieces? I would be curious to know.
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