I don’t want to be a CIO!

“Gartner predicts by 2016, 20% of CIOs in regulated industries will lose their jobs for failing to implement the discipline of information governance successfully.”

Based on that, if true, I don’t want to be a CIO. The need for information governance is very broad, and part of that is compliance. Last month’s fine paid by Standard Chartered, of a mere 1 billion, showed U.S. regulators reaching ‘new heights of aggressiveness’, according to Amanda DeBusk and Lynn Kamarck of law firm Hughes Hubbard, and is precipitating an unprecedented spike in the need for banks to trawl through historical transactions, both for potential breaches of the law at the time that they were committed, and for those which would be were today’s law to be applied retrospectively. At least two more banks, RBS in the UK and Italy’s Unicredit, are discussing with regulators possible historical sanctions breaches. Lawyers say that more disclosures will be emerging in coming months.

Not that I particularly want to defend banks or the financial industry but we can see that the continued onslaught of information is bombarding every industry and it’s tough to keep up. According to the above article, there is a serious shortage of compliance professionals and rightly so as they can also be held personally liable and face a high degree of risk.

One of the Building Blocks in our Smart Content Framework™ addresses the issue of compliance. From a view of unstructured content, the overarching enterprise governance structure allows staff to work in the most efficient and effective way possible by giving them access to information assets in a controlled and secure manner. A key component is ease of use and transparency. If governance or information management controls are too difficult, they will fail.

Organizations typically take one of two routes; either they keep all information, or force the deletion of information according to policy or length of time. The first approach results in an overwhelming amount of content, still growing at an exponential rate, that is unmanaged, and the knowledge of what the content contains can’t be identified. In the second approach, the organization is deleting corporate memory, not only intellectual assets but also records needed for potential non-compliance issues. In both scenarios, the organization is at increased risk and incurs costs associated with the inability to apply governance to all forms of content within the organization.

In both a SharePoint and non SharePoint environment we are helping to solve the problem of compliance. Using our conceptTaxonomyWorkflow with our core technology many organizations are solving governance and compliance issues.