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IBM has been at the forefront of the Information Governance movement since the formation of the IBM Data Governance Council in early 2005.  For the past six years we’ve worked closely with industry-leading companies from around the world to tackle the biggest challenges associated with governance.

Around the world, our clients are at varying stages of recognizing the necessity of Information Governance and implementing guidelines, standards, and policies.  If your or others at your company have started conversations on this topic, then this event is for you!

We would like to invite you, and 2 of your colleagues who are information stakeholders in your company, to participate in a workshop that will help you build an effective information Governance program:

- Define your needs
- Benchmark your organizational maturity
- Define your organizational structures, methodologies, and tools
- Develop new insights and build a system for information Governance

In this hands-on workshop, participants will be taken through four of the Information Governance capabilities, and asked to rank their organizations according to maturity level defined in the Information Governance Maturity Model.  All rankings are confidential and you can take home what you start and complete it later with your colleagues at your convenience.

Who should attend:

- CIO and senior IT Exectuvies
- Business Analysts and subject matter experts
- Executives involved in compliance and data protection
- Data or Information Stewards, Directors of Data Governance, and Data Architects
- Consultants and IBM Business Partners

The goal of this workshop is to educate and improve.  Participants will meet other practitioners and gain valuable insights through comparative discussions of common challenges.  New insights will be shared with the global information Governance Community, inspiring new ideas and topics.

I hope to see you there.

Information Governance Workshop at The Biltmore Estate

Six months ago, we launched an experiment based on an hypothesis now six years old.  The hypothesis was that collaboration could overcome competition and it was called the IBM Data Governance Council.  That Council was born on October 6, 2004 at a meeting I hosted at the Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, NY.  At that time I saw so many companies with common problems and no means to share their stories and the solutions seemed beyond any one organization.  The stories had pains but no name.  I called the pain and the stories “Data Governance.”

The companies in the room thought so too and so we formed a Council to continue the dialog.  That Council started with Six Members and grew to 60 organizations time, but the number was not the milestone.  Collaboration was the milestone.  We were competitors from every industry but in the room we found common cause and worked together on great ideas.  Over an 18-month period we created a Maturity Model that was the reflected work of over 80 people making small and large contributions alike to a common fabric that still has no equal.

Innovation.  That’s what it was.  And it was copied.  We copied the idea of a Maturity Model from the Software Engineering Institute.  And lots of people copied the idea of a Data Governance Maturity Model from the Council.  That’s what people do.  They learn great ideas from each other and create derivative works.  Most artifacts in this industry are derivative works of this idea.  That’s the point of innovation.   To improve.

But you know all ideas are part of a larger dialectic.  Human progress.  As soon as the ink was dry on the 1st Maturity Model in 2007, I told the Council that what we had created was special but that we were still only a small collection of 50+ organizations.  There was so much more wisdom out there that we didn’t include!  And not only would those people outside our reach learn from what we created, they would copy it and innovate beyond it.

How could we get those people to collaborate with us, I asked.  How could we bring all those voices and ideas together on a global basis and get people to innovate together?

In 2008, we looked at Open Sourcing the Maturity Model and publishing it on Ubuntu Launchpad.  I called Mark Shuttleworth to ask if we could use his platform.  He was delighted but his team asked why we would want to use a Linux Integrated Development Platform to create IP?  Because it was the only thing around.  In 2008, there was no Social Networking or Crowdsourcing.  Facebook was still for college kids and Myspace for rock stars.  We couldn’t host our ideas in those environments.

So we waited.  And in 2009, the market matured.  And two wonderful companies joined our Council – BrainPark and Chaordix.  These are both awesome IBM Business Partners that provide really innovative Social Networking solutions.  I can’t say enough good things about both of them.  But Chaordix is just amazing.  We have a symbiotic partnership that developed from our first meeting.

What you see today on the Information Governance Community is the result of that symbiosis.  We innovate together, and that innovation creates a platform where 909 Information Governance Community Members innovate on the phone, in the room, and in a global Social Networking environment that continues the experiment evolved from an hypothesis begun six years ago.

And this is just the beginning.  In 2010, we will go far beyond 909 members and far beyond the Maturity Model.  Data Governance is a market.  Doesn’t matter if you call it Data or Information.  Its a market when a community of people with common problems and purpose become aware of themselves and their issues.  We will build on that awareness.

Hosni Mubarak has been in office since the Internet was invented in the early 1980′s and his downfall is an important turning point in the evolution of Information and its power to shape Governance.  Across the world, there is a new middle class emerging that is educated and informed, that has email and Facebook, that travels and sees how other people live.  More than any other generation in history, today’s young people know the world.

That knowledge, that familiarity with how other people live, is changing people’s expectations of their own lives.  People today aren’t just watching other people on TV, in the third person, from afar.  They are playing video games with Americans in their living rooms, chatting with Europeans on Facebook, and getting news about the rest of the world on their smartphones.

But many of these connected young people are also unemployed.  In the USA and Europe, unemployment among people aged under 25 is twice the rate of those above.  In Africa, Latin America, and Asia it is 3 or 4 times as much.

What we see in Cairo’s Tahrir’s Square today is the power of information to mobilize a population of young people who are connected and under-employed, living in a system that provides them little hope of change.  This is an information revolution and just like the Social Networking Technology that Obama used to capture the White House in 2008, and the mobilization of the Tea Party Movement in 2010, the global middle class is learning to use information technology to change Governance.

This is just the beginning.