Global Information Governance Day: Four Years In

Happy Global Information Governance Day, everyone!

It’s hard to believe that today is already the fourth annual Global Information Governance Day (GIGD). This year I saw the date coming up on the calendar and helplessly watched as it approached closer and closer. Yes, GIGD was coming for another year. In prior years, we have done a lot around this day, including Twitter chats and other things, which were fun.
This year, however, we are fortunate enough to be so fully engaged in defining the best practices and the profession of IG that we haven't had as much time for GIGD hijinks s we have in the past.

Reflecting on this, I think our experience mirrors that of the IG professionals we work with in our community. Like theirs, our heads are down—laser-focused—on actually doing IG, as opposed to thinking about it, trying to define it, or just talking about it. And, even though I may be a characteristically humble Canadian, I'm not too humble to avoid letting the IGI take credit for a huge part of this transition.

Four years ago, as Tamir Sigal, Garth Landers, and I stood in the back room of Faces & Names in New York, (now the headquarters of our annual cocktail reception—thanks to the 350 people who managed to squeeze in a couple weeks ago—and riffed on Tamir's idea for GIGD, I have to be honest with you, we were laughing at the idea of having the audacity of just, well, declaring that GIGD was a thing. In hindsight, I guess audacity was probably the most important element of that discussion.

Barclay T. Blair, Founder and Executive Director of the Information Governance Initiative (IGI) and co-creator of Global Information Governance Day (GIGD).

Four years later, it's kind of crazy to see GIGD become a thing, with a lot of chatter and announcements happening in our industry. At the time we invented GIGD, the Information Governance Initiative wasn't even a gleam in my eye, unless you count a set of messy slides I created in a fever dream as a "plan."

Standing in that same spot a couple weeks ago, I was frankly kind of amazed at what has happened to IG in the past four years, and what we have accomplished at the IGI in only two.

• Yesterday, I presented our annual report on a webinar for AHIMA, a valued IGI partner and professional association for 60,000 information professionals in health care that has gone all in on IG.
• Last month, we partnered with Skytop Strategies at an event with an audience that I have never discussed IG with before. They are so hungry for knowledge and best practices around IG. These are the people who design, sit on, and build public company boards. A cool triangulation occurred at that event, where a great speaker from one of our events, Scott Ernst, a VP at Wells Fargo Insurance (and all round good guy), was a major contributor to an animated discussion around the role of IG in cyber insurance policies.
• Next month, we're doing an event with Skytop focused on the connection between cyber security and governance for institutional investors and shareholders.
• We have also done events and research with partners in the chief data officer world, in big data analytics, and in cyber security.

It's still hard for me to believe that I am talking about IG with these and so many other amazing communities in privacy, cyber security, big data, analytics, and the list goes on. Here is more of what we have achieved this year:

• We recently met with senior executives from one of the world’s largest hedge funds, who are being asked to incorporate IG into their assessments and valuations of the companies they invest in.
• Today, there are IG leaders in our corporate counsel group who now have IG staffs of dozens of people and budgets of tens of millions of dollars. (Check out the roster from our Chief Information Governance Officer (CIGO) Summit last year, and mark your calendar for May 25-26 for this year’s event, which will be even bigger and better.)
• Over the last year, our engaged audience at the IGI has doubled to more than 11,000. The number of providers supporting us also more than doubled.
• We created the IGI Awards and handed out our first CIGO of the Year Award to an amazing leader at MasterCard. Check out her acceptance video here.
• Our in-person events reached more than 1400 people, and our webinars reach thousands. In 2015, we held 7 boot camps; numerous dinners, webinars, partner events; the first annual CIGO Summit, and a national conference on IG.
• We have created numerous resources and publications, too, including, e.g.,
  • Stories in Information Governance—The IGI 2015 Benchmarking Report.
  • The IGI Annual Report 2015-2016—Based on our survey of the IG community.
  • Information Governance 2020-2020 Vision on Information Governance—looking at the predictions of IG leaders for the future of IG.
  • Introducing the Chief Information Governance Officer: A New Information Leader for a New Era.
  • And much more. Check out all of our publications available at our online community.

Our signature piece, the IGI Annual Report, now in its second year, shows how the discipline has grown and that the work of IG is getting done. This is worth a deep-dive read to bring you up to speed with what is happening today in IG. Among other things, it shows that most providers in the space predict rapid growth this year, and over one third predict at least 30%. The community is also coalescing around the need for a designated IG leader—which we had anticipated and have championed in the idea of the CIGO.

In short, we have, four years after the idea for GIGD was birthed in the kind of punch drunk conversation you have with your friends during marathon conferences, a true IG industry, market, and profession have emerged.

OK, that's about all the time we can spare for reflection. Back to work, everyone.

But, for those of you paying attention at home, don't worry, I will not disappoint. As has become the established tradition on this day, I close with the ceremonial viewing of goats yelling like people.

Happy GIGD!
Barclay