Role of the Enterprise Architect
In addition to best practices, information governance plans benefit from a holistic approach that can include people from legal, finance, corporate risk, HR, IT, and lines of business. And because enterprise architects are experts in using technology to meet business objectives, they can serve as change agents and strengthen information governance within organizations that need to break away from legacy systems. Impactful areas include the following:
- Systems Assessment—Identifying the systems that store business content and records. These can include ECM repositories: customer relationship management, human resources, enterprise resource planning, and line of business systems, as well as email inboxes, SharePoint sites, collaboration apps, and shared drives. Audits such as these are often an early step in a new governance or compliance initiative.
- Solution Architecture—Evaluation of the best way to set up governance solutions when content and records are spread across so many disparate systems. Decisions on whether records should be managed in place, in the applications where they were created, or in a centralized repository need to be made, though for many organizations, a hybrid approach may be best.
- Technology Selection—Evaluation of technologies that can help an organization meet compliance and governance objectives. Top considerations include interoperability with existing systems and content repositories and how information governance is integrated into business flow, with a minimum of manual intervention.
- Cloud Adoption—The ability to incorporate cloud storage to achieve significant savings over housing everything on-premises, leveraging popular cloud providers that offer several tiers of secure, highly durable storage to meet a variety of data access and retrieval needs. Cloud also facilitates more value from content by consolidating it on a modern platform for availability across the enterprise.
- Digital Transformation—Information governance and compliance can be used as a catalyst for digital transformation and have the potential to optimize information flows, automate repetitive functions, and modernize infrastructure for improved business outcomes and end-user experiences.
What’s Ahead
While IT organizations may never be able to protect every last bit of data across the enterprise, effective planning and asking the right questions—along with implementing best practices and leveraging enterprise architects as agents of change—can help ensure that IT organizations can provide safety, security, and compliance for today’s vast amounts of data.