A holistic approach to Information Governance in the Mining Industry

This article was published in African Mining Brief - July/August 2018

Information Governance Requires alignment between a number of functions and strategies. At the very least these include:

Alignment to corporate strategy, ensuring that benefits of information governance are clearly understood and communicated, showing how they directly assist the business in achieving its strategy
Close integration with Corporate Governance, and especially as it relates to "Information and IT Governance" as is described in King IV
Records management, with specific focus on classification, accountability, security, retention and disposal
Risk Management overall, .with specific emphasis on Information Risk
Information Security and ensuring that information in all formats and locations is identified, classified and protected throughout its lifecycle
Privacy. In South Africa this means Protection of Personal Information (POPIA), but there could be GDPR or other privacy implications for organisations spanning multiple countries. Read more information on Compliance with POPIA
Enterprise Content Management, and ensuring that all "unstructured information" is correctly managed, ensuring that duplication is minimised or eliminated, and that information is shared appropriately.
e-discovery, and the ability to easily identify, locate and retrieve information which may be required for any purpose. All information relating to a case or subject must be identifiable.
Master data management and data quality. The "structured data" residing in corporate ICT systems needs to be managed as an integral component of Information Governance.