The importance of content services for information governance

Information governance is a crucial business framework that defines requirements and procedures for regulating the creation, use, sharing, and storage of information in your company. It’s an all-encompassing approach that helps everyone in your organisation uphold the policies, standards, processes, and individual roles that steer agile, effective, and secure information management. 

Not only does information governance preserve and protect your data, but it also helps you achieve your business goals by breaking down silos and disconnected data systems, streamlining how your organisation manages its assets.

In this blog, we uncover the benefits of information governance and how content services can play a pivotal role in enhancing security and efficiency within your framework.

What are the benefits of information governance?

Information governance is now considered essential for any business. This is because the appropriate framework enables your organisation to strategically and responsibly manage your business data and maintain its integrity throughout the information lifecycle. Information governance offers an extensive range of benefits, including: 

• Actionable data insights: With good data comes good insights. An information governance framework helps to continually support your business priorities by providing accurate, accessible and timely access to relevant information. This can help your business leaders to make informed decisions that lead to more meaningful outcomes for your organisation.
• Increased productivity and collaboration: An information governance framework supported by intuitive technologies can minimise disruptive workflows, improve communication across teams and departments, and allow faster, easier access to the information your staff needs. With more effective information sharing, you’ll enhance productivity, facilitate more impactful collaboration and eliminate siloed ways of working.
• Ensure regulatory compliance with industry standards: An information governance framework can ensure your business’s internal procedures meet industry standards. In an increasingly complex business landscape with ever-changing regulations and requirements, this is crucial to avoid the threat of penalties, financial losses, prosecution, and a tarnished reputation resulting from noncompliance.
• A robust security posture: With cybersecurity threats an increasingly prominent risk to modern businesses, the need for stronger security is greater than ever before. A suitable information governance framework can drastically minimise the risk of data breaches by defining the protocols for a business-wide approach to document security.

How can content services support information governance?

Content services are key to accelerating, protecting and streamlining the environment in which information assets are managed in your organisation. They empower your team to securely and efficiently create, share, use and manage documents and records in line with your information governance framework and overall business objectives. This helps preserve the value of the data being stored, meet industry compliance standards, and provide a practical solution for all staff and stakeholders who need to interact with business information regularly.

Here are three significant ways that content services can support information governance in your organisation: 

1. Security and access management

Giving your people easy, mobile access to information is as critical as maintaining a high level of security. But how do you do both? Content services enable you to eliminate unsecured paper trails and the associated risks of misplacing or losing printed files by digitising your document environment. With secure technology, such as end-to-end data encryption, you can remove the risk of your documents falling into the wrong hands by implementing controls and permissions that ensure they are accessed only by specific teams or individuals. This enables your staff to work productively and flexibly in a controlled digital environment.

2. Advanced data capture and indexing

Innovative document management technologies can uphold information governance in your organisation by aligning and improving how information is captured and stored. Content services’ advanced data capture and indexing features can efficiently recognise, classify, and auto-tag information using artificial intelligence. This makes it easier to find stored data later, while also saving valuable time and resources, and eliminating human error from the entire data management process.

3. Digital data archiving

While information governance planning is often focused primarily on data security and classification, the long-term retention of information is sometimes overlooked. That’s where content services work wonders once again with digital archiving. This allows you to safely store dormant data, minimise record management risks, and maintain compliance and legal standards, even as requirements change. Suppose a contract, email, sales order, invoice or any other document needs to be checked in the future. In that case, innovative search features let you find it by entering a keyword or phrase, giving you access within seconds. This enables your organisation to cohesively safeguard information, maintain data integrity, and efficiently, securely, and compliantly retrieve or destroy business information when necessary.

Are you ready to start improving your business workflows? Document management software is the place to start. Download our buyer's guide to learn the key features you need to look for to choose the best Document Management System for your business.

KYOCERA Document Solutions provides document management solutions that improve document cost control and security, while delivering greater productivity, reliability and uptime.