Information governance takes center stage in Jason R. Baron’s most recent article, and it’s worth the read. He examines recent research findings of The Information Governance Initiative, a relatively new, but very active, consortium focused on advancing the understanding and practices associated with information governance.

We’ve all heard (and are probably tired) of big data, information chaos, and cloud computing, but the reality is that there is so much information coming from so many sources, that it is extremely difficult to manage it all, let alone understand what “it” is. Of course, this only makes addressing the data challenges more important for both large and small organizations. Whether it’s about business continuity, privacy, compliance or trade secrets, the information that sits on computer servers within and outside of an organization’s walls must be managed, easily accessible and quickly understood.

As Baron points out, we’re now entering a phase where the technology aimed at solving these problems is finally catching up to the potential promised years ago. Today, it’s real–forward-thinking organizations are dedicating real people and major resources to ensure information governance projects are successful.

For effective information governance, I agree with Baron that the use of analytics and machine learning to provide “visibility” into data are mandatory prerequisites. This includes the ability to examine and automatically categorize information based upon a taxonomy. Another forward-looking statement is that information governance will be “by design” in that the tools, products, and processes used by organizations will incorporate IG capabilities rather than have them delivered by special purpose solutions.

Machine learning and analytics are, indeed, the two primary domains that will take information governance from a theory to a working practice. Requiring humans to perform arduous tasks that involve subject matter expertise on potentially sensitive information is fraught with error, inconsistency, and privacy problems. Allowing the ever-growing capabilities of computers to understand will provide the complimentary capabilities that will make information more visible and, more importantly, more organized.   While there are literally hundreds of solutions and service providers emerging to address these fundamental needs, the ability to embed these core “visibility and organization” functions will become increasingly critical in order to maintain a consistent capability across various business departments that use different software.

At Parascript, we excel at making hard-to-access data accessible and relevant. For decades, Parascript has extracted meaningful data from images. Lately, we’ve been focused on applying advanced classification functionality to further enhance our clients’ workflows and business processes. We do this through machine learning and analytics. In the larger world of information governance, our new classification functionality tackles the arduous task of organizing and describing documents as part of our Parascript application platform. We work with our premium, trusted software partners to bring these core capabilities to our clients as an integrated solution.