The Information Governance Reference Model Project (IGRM) recently released its IGRM Model 3.0, which purports to help businesses achieve unified information governance. The new model includes “privacy and security” as primary functions in collaboration of information. The Project, which is part of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), works to create dialogue within organizations, especially IT, legal and records organizations and to “provide a common, practical, flexible framework to help organizations develop and implement effective and actionable information management programs.”
By creating transparency and helping organizations communicate, information can be more efficiently managed and eventually disposed.
The implementation of privacy and security to the model illustrates the changing values as businesses move into electronic records management.
Diane Carlisle, deputy executive director for ARMA International, a non-profit that collaborated with EDRM to build the IGRM, explained, “from managing hard copy information to email, instant messages, and social media, those responsible for an organizatio”s information governance must evolve along with rapidly changing technologies.”
As the press release for the IGRM 3.0 model explains, with increasing amounts of data, the costs of managing information also increase, even as value of the data decreases over time. With increasing costs, it is in the company’s best interests to dispose of data, bringing in the need for the privacy and security section of the new model.
When managing and organizing data, it is also expensive for companies to move to the electronic records management practices included in the IGRM. With data entry services and data processing services, companies can concentrate on the communication regarding information, rather than the move to electronic data management itself.