A company sets up her information governance structure and yet, fails to gauge the responsibilities that would ensure that the strategy in place meets the business requirements. And, more specifically, if they have the monitoring capacities to ensure that everything that has been set in place delivers what is set that it would deliver.
Monitoring responsibilities help any organisation confirm that the correct jobs are carried out in the right way. For example, a company that leaves the management of customer onboarding to a staff that’s not formally trained leaves room for mistakes and vulnerabilities.
Another example is the workload to meet a particular goal is not calculated and invariably affects the business-as-usual activities. With regards to information governance and the regulator perspective, the monitoring capacities will usually ensure consistent processes are developed to mitigate arising risks, or to detect risks before they manifest and more importantly, the reporting on compliance would feed into the structure.
In this article, I focus on the main areas for monitoring responsibilities in information governance.
Controls and internal audit. Some controls can be intrusion detection systems, prevention solutions, firewalls, antivirus software or any interface that ensures that there is no known breach. It could also involve the use of access methodologies to ensure that individual only have certain levels of privilege in the use of a particular document. Internal audit would now entail the checking of these tools to ensure that they are working and doing what they are supposed to be doing.
Metrics and reporting. Metrics are used to provide data points for organisations to know what to improve or what to work on. For example, an organisation can count the number of intrusions they’ve add over the past quarter or the gather all security threats they’ve had over a period for them to know the questions to ask and what to work on in the next phase of their development. And reporting helps provide a structured audit trail of what has happened before, the action points that were taken and the steps that were taken to ensure that those things do not happen again.
Work measurement: What is the measure of work involved in what we are trying to achieve? How long would it take us and what resources do we need to achieve the goals at hand? It would also help the organisation know the financial implications of what is needed for the project.
Performance evaluation: enhances the ability of the organisation accomplishing strategic goals and objectives and if the actions put in place are driving the goals of the organisation. Traditional qualitative method used to evaluate employee performance vis-à-vis the delivery of project.
360 feedbacks: It is important to get feedback from staffs. This will feed into the information management system and make the system solid.
We use benchmarking is also known as a method to improve the organization’s management by establishing a standard, determining the organization’s level by making comparisons with the best practices and making up deficiencies detected. The information security management benchmark applies this method to information security measures.
Monitoring responsibilities gives an organisation know where they are, what they need to be doing and more importantly, helps to drive business strategy in a guided manner.
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