In common with other new bloggers, I’ve had a drought recently so I’m chuffed to be able to grab the chance presented by our Spring User Forum to hopefully re-capture some of my social media mojo. We try to run these events a couple of times a year and we always look for open and active customer participation as well as getting others from outside our immediate ‘family’ involved where we can.
We continued our recent track record of quirky venues with the Imperial War Museum’s Churchill War Rooms in London. Like HMS Belfast, this choice offered great atmosphere and our team’s delivery of the information governance (IG) message clearly remained compelling enough that the dark underground setting didn’t force anyone to sleep. I was able to provide a company and global market update to everyone and to highlight great IG leadership stories from BAE Systems and Rio Tinto. Brilliant to hear of Cairn Energy and Wipro’s case study on their success in extracting new value from acquired oil asset data using our discovery and analytics.
The highlight, of course, was Jason R Baron‘s keynote exploring his “7 Lessons in Information Governance: From Ollie North to Hillary Clinton”. Although I do a passable job of keeping up with the market discussion, for some reason I hadn’t heard Jason speak until now and he did a great job of showing me what I had missed. His delivery is unique and very entertaining and, of course, the benefit of his knowledge and experience really stood out too as he took us on a short trip through several past and current high-profile examples of the ‘so what’ for information governance.
For me, the real take homes for our audience were that doing a better job of governing/managing corporate information is a fight worth fighting [aka, its tough, but keep up the good fight] and that although the RM easy button for classification technology is still very much a work in progress there is much that can and should be practically achieved today with technologies like Active Navigation.
Inspired by the venue, Jason closed out his session with a bit of impromptu manipulation of Winston Churchill quotes. Whether or not they will be established in the future history of IG progress remains to be seen – you judge….
“We shall go on from the left side of the EDRM model to the end
We shall zealously cooperate in e-disclosure under Part 31
We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in information governance
We shall defend our deletions whatever the cost may be
We shall fight for IG in the cubicles and on our mobile devices
We shall fight for IG in the corporate suites and offices
We shall fight for IG in every legacy repository, every network, every shared drive
We shall fight for IG for every overburdened end-user trying to manage their data under the new EU directive
We shall fight for privacy and for the right to be forgotten
And we shall never ever surrender!”
Jason R Baron
Take that to the Boardroom – I guess sometimes it really does feel like we’re pitched in an IG War! Good to know we have people like Jason on our side.