This is Part 2 in a series about creating and executing an effective file plan for your organization. Click here to read the previous post: Creating a Retention Schedule that Works.

Office 365 provides an excellent foundation for organizations to improve information management and productivity in the cloud.  But what about Office 365 makes it the ideal starting place for your policy initiatives? It's all about flexibility and integration. With the right extensions, Office 365 can also provide structure to a hybrid environment that includes on-premises systems and other cloud solutions.     

SharePoint and Office 365 are the ideal platform for enterprise collaboration, and offer some enterprise-grade information governance features. The Microsoft platform provides excellent value on its own, but can easily be extended with third-party software to enable IG and records management features that provide industry leading compliance from within a system users can already understand.

I learned the Dewy Decimal system in fourth grade, but I'm not sure they teach that any longer!  With modern software, card catalogs and manual sorting are a thing of the past in libraries, and that ease of access should flow through to the digital workplace.

Information Governance Conference 2017 is closing in, and the award nominations have just opened! As they describe it: "This conference is the premier gathering of the leaders in the field of Information Governance. It is designed to offer exceptional educational and networking opportunities to increase the effectiveness information efforts, while sharing best practices."

For an information governance plan to be effective, it needs to be complete. The content that your organization generates, the purpose that content serves, where it's stored, and who needs to access and modify it are all important considerations, and the more comprehensively you can answer these questions, the better your results will be.

Manual content management takes up too much time to be productive. As we said in our last post in this series, employees in traditional/paper-based offices spend six hours a week on average searching for paper documents and eight hours per week creating reports. With productivity at such a premium, this time investment is not sustainable.

What does it take for a well-intentioned information governance initiative to fail? As records and information manager roles are adapting to adjust to the ever-changing business environment, they must keep in mind some critical mistakes to avoid making. This post lays out five ways to become a data governance leader at the core of your organization's information governance strategy and avoid these costly pitfalls.

SharePoint is not an IT resource, it is a business resource. Despite that, many organizations see the technical requirements of deployment and relegate full-time management and information governance within their SharePoint environment entirely to IT.

If there is one thing to take away from the last year, it is that information should not be taken for granted. Not only can a data breach cause huge issues, but it can actually be used to generate revenue.