Today, technology is playing a vital role in realizing the vision for India’s growth and is an enabler for the change that we all seek – be it in delivering better citizen services, efficient and productive functioning, or using technology to provide a new social security platform.

As high-speed internet services & smart phones are becoming more accessible and easily affordable in both urban and rural areas, the Indian citizens have started experiencing new digital services like Digital Banking, electronic identity scheme (Aadhar) and many other Citizen services over the internet bidding good-bye to File -Babu culture.

Business leaders & organizations have also started to grasp the huge potential of this Digitization to drive competitive advantage. With the prevalence of social media, online blogs, e-mail exchanges and cloud computing, while at one hand organizations are looking to extract valuable information from this data but on the other hand such large volume of data can pose a huge problem of Information Governance for the Chief Compliance & Risk Officer.

Regulatory expectations have risen globally like New EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), placing tremendous pressure on organizations to take proactively steps for ensuring Personal Privacy, breach notification obligation, to formulate transparent policies around data processing & retention.

Without Information Governance in place, if when an organization may become the target of litigation, regulatory request, Internal investigation like under employment law, compliance audit etc hiring attorneys to go through hundreds of thousands or even millions of emails & records for information relevant to a legal action can be hugely time-consuming and expensive. Hence now a day’s Chief compliance and Risk officers should start empowering themselves for Information Governance which is all about keeping your data around when you need it and getting rid of it when you don’t. i.e. They should know not only how much data their organizations have, what type, how old – till when to keep, when to delete but most notably how to find a needle in this haystack when legal team may require that.

Information Governance policies and tools should be in place to automate the Classification of data depending upon the age, user, type, sensitivity and attributes like fingerprints etc. Compliance/Risk Officer should be able to apply intelligent policies and actions to preserve high value data in-place and purge what’s redundant, trivial or obsolete to reduce information discovery costs.

Advanced e-Discovery tools can streamline and speed up the process by Identifying redundant information with features like Near-duplicates detection and Email Thread analysis and the use of predictive coding technology can help to identify relevant documents and calculates the relevance of each document in the data set.

Summary

if you are a Compliance and Risk officer and because of poor Information governance control, its taking ages to find the right information on time in the middle of a legal or internal investigation, the impact can be very high to your organization. You should start empowering yourselves to find the needle in haystack…….