All information managers know that appropriate information governance is an important compliance task. Failure to enforce best practices can lead to fines, sanctions and loss of reputation to an organization.
For those responsible for building and enforcing classification policies, retention schedules, and other aspects of a systematic records management plan, the problem with traditional, manual classification methods is that content must first be classified in order to determine why, how long, and in what format it must be retained. While certainly methodical in its approach, this sequential, intensive analysis is time-consuming, expensive, and inconsistent at best.
Despite new technology, organizations quickly come to the conclusion that keeping up with the pace of content growth is a race that can’t be won. Too often the battle is lost before it’s even begun, or organizations adopt a dangerous, “faith-based” model, trusting that the right thing is happening, but failing to ensure this is the case until a problem arises and then it’s too late.
In reality, classification is the last thing end-users want to do. Users see the process of sorting through records as intrusive, complex, and counterproductive – not to mention boring, time consuming and uninspiring. As long as organizations rely on users to manually ensure that policies are followed they’re going to be stuck between stifling, tedious, workflow and inconsistent results, all it takes is for one sensitive document to be mishandled and all the good work is worth nothing.
Here at Smartlogic, we do a lot of talking about Information Governance. No only us, but a lot of other folks as well. But there’s one thing that we can add to Information Governance that others can’t and that’s consistency because without consistency information governance is largely futile.
Semaphore Classification Server provides a solution to the consistency problem. Using an automatic classification process, users can quickly build sophisticated rules that tag and classify documents with a high level of precision and consistency every time. And when those results are tied to a good information governance strategy the chances of mishandling documents and sanctions by regulators are greatly reduced.
