As organisations grow in size and complexity, so too is the volume of content that’s being created and needs to be governed. Business units require specific solutions for each department or functional area.  As a result there are numerous application silos across the organisation which creates a nightmare to manage and govern information. In turn, it’s also becoming increasingly difficult to identify what needs to be kept and makes applying correct retention policies near impossible task.

This doesn’t just present challenges around ensuring accessible long-term institutional knowledge – it can present serious risks for organisations that manage highly sensitive information and are legally bound to maintain transparency of not only what decisions have been made, but how they were made.

If this sounds familiar, you could be among the increasing number of information managers who are battling the insidious effects of content sprawl.

 The red flags of content sprawl:

1.There’s no ‘complete picture of information’ across your enterprise.

• As there is no single register of all your digital assets, you have limited understanding of the unstructured content spread across your organisations. In other words, there’s no way of knowing what you don’t know.

• You have a plethora of specific applications that users need to get their job done – resulting in the creation of silos of ungoverned information.

• You have information management policies in place, but you have no way of knowing whether they’re being applied or not.

2. You feel like you’re in the Wild West of information governance

• There’s no uniform method or approach to identify and protect critical information across the breadth of your organisation.

• Content is either incorrectly classified or not classified at all. This can lead to Security blackspots, disposal schedules not being applied and legal liabilities.

• Unauthorised parties within your organisation are able to access sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

• ROT (Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial) is spreading throughout other systems, creating duplicates and confusion about the most accurate or up-to-date version of your content.

3.Everyone starts to scramble the minute something goes wrong

• When the FOI request hits your inbox or the ministerial request lands on your desk; when your department head’s called up to give evidence at a committee hearing or you’re being held to account for a decision made 5 years ago, you don’t know where to begin.f

• Your records team is spending hours searching multiple repositories for decision-making trails, key documents and policies.

• You’re unable collect all the relevant information, which means you can’t show which decisions were made or how they were arrived at. Is a crucial document missing? You’ll never know for sure.

If you recognise any of the above ‘red flags’ it means that the rapid growth of information is outstripping your ability to manage it. However, there is an answer – Federated Governance.  

Download Objective’s insight paper that discusses this innovative approach to taming content sprawl. Federated information governance brings a modern, connected approach to corporate information governance – it provides a way to “manage” everything from one place – but leaves content and data in their native systems.

To learn more download Objective’s Insight paper.

About Objective

Using Objective software thousands of public sector customers are shifting to being completely digital. Where our customers can work from anywhere; with access to information, governance guaranteed and security assured.

Australian owned and ASX listed, Objective has continually invested significantly in the ongoing development of products that deliver outstanding solutions to the public sector and regulated industries. This includes organisations such as the Australian Defence Organisation, both the Welsh and Scottish Governments, NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet and the ACT Government.

Objective 3Sixty is the latest addition to the Objective content services suite that also includes SaaS EDRMS, workflow and processing tools, governance solutions for both Microsoft Teams and Outlook and secure cloud collaboration. Learn more about Objective 3Sixty here.