What Information Governance Profeionals Can Teach Citizens of Westeros by Michelle L. Kirk, CRM, IGP

I was recently re-watching the last episode of last season's Game of Thrones (GoT) to get ready for the new season. (I also re-read book 5 of A Song of Ice and Fire for the same reason don't judge!) In one scene, two opposing characters accidentally and shockingly ran into one another in a mountain pass. If you are a fan of the books or the show, you won't be surprised to know that one of them died as a result of the chance encounter.

Westeros is a tough neighborhood to live in these days. The mountain pass incident is pretty much an example of everyday life there. Rich, poor, Knight, Brother no one is exempt from risk. Sometimes attacks are intentional, but often it is circumstance and it usually leads to death for a major player in the game. There are threats everywhere and so many characters that if you are one it's tough to keep track of where you or your house might be exposed. People's lives and futures depend on the decisions you make when you engage. Heck, you can't even attend a wedding without seriously weighing the risks who is allied with whom, which citizens might have teamed up with your nemesis and let in some bad guys, or how likely you are to die at any given moment.

Doing what I do for a living, I started thinking how much an Information Map would help (let's face it, those character lists in the back of the books just don't cut it.) If you were a Lannister, for instance, you could map each house, where they are right now, how much of a risk they represent to you, who their connections are, and the likelihood of if and how they might try to remove you. You would be able to leverage this information in a few ways. The most important one would be that you could use your (borrowed in their case) resources to strategically focus on minimizing the biggest or most likely risks. Another would be your ability to leverage the information in your map to mitigate threats make deals, alliances, and stave off general doom (after all, The Spider doesn't collect this intel for no reason.) The last is that you would have information in place to enable you to react quickly when confronted with an unexpected threat (or request for information ) and it would remove some of that element of surprise.

I'm sure you saw this coming, but it's

the same in business. Maybe you're not worried about death by sword so much, but we all have threats coming at us from a thousand directions: litigation, security breaches, regulatory audits. There are so many risks that involve our information that it is tough to keep up with. A great way to be more proactive in your risk mitigation is to know what information you have that exposes or helps you attack that risk. Strategically, you should know what your information represents, where it is in your organization, and what its value or riskiness is.

Once you have it built, an Information Map helps you focus resources, leverage what you know in better ways, and react to unexpected requests and actions without the normal fire drill. This knowledge puts you in a position to do more with analytics, improving customer experience, enabling you to drive products and services in a targeted way, or identifying trends which point out bad actors across your business. In essence, an Information Map enables you to drive your Information Governance direction in a proactive manner. Instead of being caught unaware in that mountain pass, having that map can arm you in a way that will help avoid the risky situation AND help turn your information into a valuable commodity rather than a burden.

As everyone in Westeros can probably tell you, even if you didn't choose to be part of the game, you're in it, so do your best to survive know your threats and prepare! My colleague, Maurice Labrie, will be at MER2015 in Chicago. If you're attending stop by to learn how a Map can help your organization identify and respond to information related risks.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2015/service-lines/records-management-an...
	See more stories from ironmountain

Most recent headlines