AIIM: Most firms suffer from a lack of information governance

Over half (51 percent) of organisations have had “data-related incidents” in the past 12 months, including 16 percent suffering a data breach, according to new AIIM research.

The new report, Information Governance – too important for humans, reveals that 45 percent of respondents feel a lack of information governance leaves their organisation “wide open” to litigation and data protection risks.

Furthermore, 41 percent of respondents admit that their email management is “chaotic” and 22 percent are reporting a negative financial impact from cases around electronic records.

“The sheer volume of data in business is a major asset for most organisations,” said Doug Miles, chief analyst at information management industry body AIIM. “But without effective information governance, that data also carries a potentially huge risk, both in terms of reputation and the bottom line.

“Lots of organisations are talking about information governance, but far less are actually doing it properly – that has to change in 2016.”

The severity and frequency of data incidents reported in the research has meant that information governance has never generated so much interest, said AIIM. For 28 percent of organisations, IG is “very high” on the senior management agenda and more than half (53 percent) have recently launched new IG initiatives.

The ever-growing amount of data has led to a renewed acknowledgement that using automation is essential for IG, with 60 percent of respondents agreeing that automation is the only way to keep up with the volumes of electronic content. And 21 percent are already using automated declaration or classification of records.

Although cloud-based content and mobile access are by no means new initiatives for most organisations, this is yet to be reflected in many IG policies. Information retention, access security and data protection are covered by most respondents’ IG policies, but only 47 percent cover mobile access and mobile devices, including BYOD (39 percent).

And only 36 percent have specific policies for cloud-based content sharing, while 57 percent say senior management are “only interested when things go wrong”.

“People readily acknowledge that their organisations’ IG policies are flawed and that automation is the future for effective IG,” said Miles. “But this has not yet been borne out in the required changes to those policies – senior buy-in is absolutely critical to this.”

For the survey, 400 individual members of the 80,000-strong AIIM community were questioned.

@AntonySavvas