Guest editorial
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/RMJ-03-2019-048 |
| Published date | 11 March 2019 |
| Pages | 2-4 |
| Date | 11 March 2019 |
| Author | Elizabeth Lomas,Basma Makhlouf Shabou,Arina Grazhenskaya |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance |
Guest editorial
Information governance and ethics –information opportunities and challenges
in a shifting world: setting the scene
The information governance context
Information governance (IG) is a multidisciplinary approach to managing information,
which has emerged over the past decade and continues to develop. With the rise of new
technologies, we have seen the value of information receiving greater prominence and
increasingly being commoditized (World Economic Forum, 2011). Information is now often
co-created across global boundaries and blurred personal and public spaces, with complex
ownership and legalregimes impacting. In response, frameworks to underpinthe delivery of
information through time have increasingly acknowledged the diversity of professional
expertise needed to support a wide range of information contexts, including, for example,
archivists, digital curators,digital forensics experts, IT support, lawyers, librarians, records
managers, software engineers and technical infrastructure engineers (Makhlouf Shabou
et al.,2017). Some frameworks have re-envisaged their profession and rebranded it IG, e.g.
COBIT 5 (ISACA, 2012), which aligns the IT sector with information security, and the
ARMA Information GovernanceMaturity Model, which aligns records management withIG
(ARMA International,2010). Others have perhaps underplayed the role of IG, representingit
only as a niche component of information delivery, for example, the CILIP Professional
Knowledge and Skills Base model defines IG as delivery within theinformation rights law
space (CILIP, 2019), which does denote its significance for legal and ethical information
delivery. While each of these models articulates a valuable aspect of IG delivery, it is
important not to ignore the bigger implications of IG. IG is an overarching domain that
acknowledges wide-rangingneeds and complex relationships to manage information for the
benefit of society.
The evolution of information governance
The roots of IG lie in corporate governance agenda, which sought to ensure ethical
frameworks for managing organizations (Willis, 2005, p.86-87). However, IG grew and
evolved as the value of information as anasset was increasingly recognized from the 1990s,
as established in the work of Robert Hawley’s KMPG IMPACT Committee (KMPG, 1995).
New technologies have enhanced its value exponentially in the twenty-first century,and in
turn this has exposed informationto new cyber risks, highlighting the need for information
security systems. In 2010, Lomas made the case for records management and information
security agenda to be aligned under the banner of IG, ARMA developed an ARMA
Information Governance Maturity Model and Deborah Logan (2010) wrote a powerful
Gartner blog post developing corporate governance agenda to take account of the role and
value of information:
Information governance is the specification of decision rights and an accountability framework to
encourage desirable behavior in the valuation, creation, storage, use, archival and deletion of
information. It includes the processes, roles, standards and metrics that ensure the effective and
efficient use of information in enabling an organization to achieve its goals.
From 2011, Lomas provided masters-level IG teaching at Northumbria University, and
Kerstin Ferguson-Boucher taughtIG at Aberystwyth University; there is now a plethora of
IG training and education on offer throughout the world. New bodies have evolved,
RMJ
29,1/2
2
RecordsManagement Journal
Vol.29 No. 1/2, 2019
pp. 2-4
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0956-5698
DOI 10.1108/RMJ-03-2019-048
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