 Hello, everyone, and thank you for taking a look at this post tweet jam discussion. This last or this week, it's days ago, so long ago. The cloud-type tweet jam is around building an information governance strategy from scratch. The idea of this, and I'm joined by Martina, and Martina, thanks for joining me and sharing some of your insights. Yeah, thanks for the invitation, Christian. It's always a pleasure to be part of the tweet jams you're hosting since years. So it feels like years. Almost 11 years now, I know, it's a long time. It's a long time. Well, this is a great topic. I know that we had a lot of people that were at in-person events that are starting up again, which is fantastic, that are really passionate about this. We actually have got responses back from a number of people, and I'm putting together an article on this, so you'll see some other content on this topic. But Martina, I wanted to get your thoughts around this because information governance is such a critical aspect to everything that we do, certainly within the SharePoint and the Teams world, the collaboration technology space. It's not just about, hey, how can we connect and communicate and collaborate on things, but what's then happening with all of the information, all of the data that's created within the system, and having a strategy for that because one of the huge failures of information systems in general, is it's great that you're creating the exponential growth of content. But if you can't find it in a timely manner, in context to your work, then it's a failure. It doesn't matter how well you can store content. If you can never find it again, it's failed. That's the crux of this topic here. Let's kick things off. The first question was a foundational. What is information governance, and how does it differ from data governance? So from my perspective, information governance covers all data which are around. It's not only a file which is stored, it's all communication, it's everything, and it's more targeting the content of the data. This is the main difference around that. It's covering on-premises, it covers paper, it covers a conversation which is held on the phone or a Teams conversation and so on, and it's also conversations or communication which is within Teams or within Microsoft 365. Yeah, it could be videos, it could be chats, it could be line item requirements, data points that are within that. I think of the same thing like data governance is around, when I think of metadata and taxonomy, classification of that, the treatment and the handling of the individual components, where the information governance is then the broader, the business rules and reasoning behind that, which can include the end-to-end lifecycle of that content from creation through deletion or archival of that. That's true. The second question was, so how can organizations get started with the information governance? And this is kind of a, there's a couple of questions I always like to kind of handle this. We bring in experts on this for somebody that's coming in that's newer and thinking if I started in the right place, you know, like where do you, when you have a conversation with an organization that is failing at their information governance, like where do you usually start them out? Where should people like undertake the first couple of steps? So what I think what's really important is that you start small, because if you have a big strategy and so on, and then you throw that on the people, people that adopt to it would be pretty low. So I would suggest to start small with pen and paper. And then you communicate with all your teams, which are involved in information governance, could be compliance, could be legal, could be security, could be the user, and just ask them, how did you do it before? How are you doing it now? And what is your desire to do it in the future? Or how would you like it to be done? That's, so I started as a business analyst 30 years ago, and that's always been my approach. It's, you can't start designing the future state unless you understand where you are today and how people are doing things. And a lot of times there are also insights into the culture of the collaboration, and it doesn't mean that it's wrong, and you'll actually have greater adoption if you can make changes that fit within the way that people are working today. So if you outline that current state, and then when you start looking at, okay, we're doing it this way, however, for compliance reasons, we need to do this, or we also need this other information, and here's how we would leverage that. That's a great way for people to, it's like take what's good and add to it rather than us scrapping it. Here's a framework, do all this, and then go back to the old way of doing things. Yes, exactly. And also what I saw is it takes a little bit longer if you talk with a lot of people because you get different opinions. On the other side, you learn incredible things about how business is doing it, and what are their use cases, and how you can improve their use cases. Right. Well, that's especially if they've gone through that effort of defining the use cases, you might disagree with it. It might be broken, it might cause other problems, but there's reasons behind that, which impact how fast you make a change, whether you make those changes or not. Well, this kind of gets into the next question around governance framework. So what are the core components of an information governance framework, and why would you use a framework? So, and the thought about that, and it's kind of framework is the new thing, and I see that many customers need guidance on how to start, and this is what the framework is for. So if you say, I wanna build something new, or I wanna do it better, a framework could be incredible helpful in implementing information governance in an organization. So I see it as a huge benefit for companies, if they haven't implemented something yet, and if they wanna do something new, a framework could be really helpful for them. Well, like anything, a framework that's been developed by experts over time is a great way if you're relatively new to the space, just to make sure that your planning, your activities are robust, and that you're not leaving something out. At least, and I always say that, I don't care what the methodology is, what the framework is that you bring, bring one that's organized that structured to get you to thinking of things that you might not otherwise identify, and you can always scratch things like, no, that doesn't apply, that one doesn't apply, oh, I didn't think of that. And so it's a great way to kind of build that comprehensive plan as to adhere to that. And of course, do your research in certain areas that there's so much content that's out there, so many experts, especially in this space, if you're in the Microsoft ecosystem, there are great people out there, smart people that are blogging, writing, speaking, there are books on this topic. MVPs and regional directors that you can tap into and ask for guidance on, if you have questions around these things, like Martina is a person you can reach out to, very friendly, she answers her emails. Sometimes. Sometimes. Well, fourth question. So how does your organization measure the information governance process and overall success? That's always, if you don't know what success looks like, how do you know you've achieved it? So I thought a lot about that question upfront when I went through that. So for me, it's always that you have time and preparation and do some discovery throughout the data. So that you see what kind of data do we have and so on and how we can measure that. And that would be my first step. And then as soon as you have started the discovery process, you can implement and quantify the outcome. How do your customers respond when you talk about that discovering and kind of analysis of data before moving forward? Because I mean, my experience as customers don't want to pay for this. Like, well, aren't you the expert? That's why I'm hiring you to do this stuff? Yes. How do you respond to that? Yeah, it's kind of, in that case, you would go, or you would do a lot of guessing and you're kind of blind. So if you do not know the data and if they do not do a discovery, it would be really hard for you to implement the success factor around that. So my customers, sometimes they're very, I wouldn't call it impatient, but they want to get it done very fast. And then I need to explain them, okay, we need to look at what do we have? How the data look like? What is the structure and what are our pain points? And for that, we need an analysis of your environment. And then they understand. Then you can start, I mean, as a consultant, as a project manager working on these types of initiatives, then once you have that outlined, then you can start to outline and have conversations around, okay, what are the KPIs for success around this? What are we trying to go in and do? Yes. Sometimes it's the, okay, I get this sense of where your data is, but there's a lot of cleanup. So here's what we need to do before we can really truly move to the next step. Here's how much time we expect that to take. So there's one metric to go in there and measure the cleanup process. And so to break that down into, here's what we would go and do. And then once you have that as is plan, that model build is then you as much as possible, then you break that down to here's what we need to do first. Here's what we need to do second. Here's kind of the steps through this and you can do measure around each one of those steps as much as possible. So yeah, there's a, I realized that so much of that, what we've just described is a, it depends answer, the infamous, it depends answers on what you find. But that's part of the process, why you do the discovery. Cause otherwise, if you march down a path towards a solution, start building based on some framework that you pulled off of somebody's website that looks solid without fully understanding your system and where you're going and you're having that you'll get the increased scope over time. You'll, it won't be exactly what you wanted to try to find your way. So you benefit from doing the planning up front. Yeah, definitely. And this is also what you see if you do a proper planning upfront, the project goes much easier afterwards. Right. So the next question was, what are the biggest employee gaps experienced when enforcing information governance policies and how do you overcome those? So what I learned is, if you have a new information governance process and you implement that it needs to go hand in hand with adoption and change management because the user needs to understand the why. Why is it needed that I work now in that way or what is happening? Otherwise you will have a lot of blockers from the user perspective. They won't adopt it and they won't use it. And then it was unnecessary. And also very often when I saw projects that it goes in a very strict way in the beginning. So if you start very strict, you get a lot of refusal from users. They just don't adopt it. And they said, okay, I wanna prevent that kind of process at any cost. I do it in another way. This is how shadow at T happens. Yeah. I used this analogy again during the Tweet Jam but I've said this many, many times over the years, but people are like water running downhill. You put a rock in front of them, they will go around the rock and continue downhill. And so it's funny, again, from my put my business analyst hat on, it's always amazing to see projects that are created and managed and architected within the vacuum of IT or the vacuum of the management layer and not involving the people that actually use the solutions on a day-to-day basis. I don't think that that's as prevalent as it used to be and waterfall methods were much more iterative. It's much more organic now. But you, and I'm not saying make decisions by committee. Have a process to drive change. It goes back to your change management. You have to make a decision at some point you get the inputs. That's part of, it's why we get paid the big dollars. That's why management, their managers is to take limited information, add it to their experience, make a decision, move forward and measure the progress. But you have to involve your employees, your end users. And also sometimes I start very small that I said, let us start the process with a small group within the organization. Who are kind of used to that, what we are doing and understand the why. And let's just check how it works with them. If it works with them, we can go and scale it out to the rest of the organization. And that works pretty well. I love asking it's like, what did you ever do? Yeah, we ran a pilot. I was like, okay, then what'd you do after that? Well, then we implement it. I was like, okay, so you know, you can run a pilot, take the learnings, run a second pilot and then slowly grow it and expand it. I like to see that slow expansion and then speed it up when it logically makes sense. Yeah. Or proof of concept. Right. And that means a proof of concept is always you have some learnings and you need to implement that. Right. And we're gonna get it, I think in question seven and we're gonna talk about some of those learnings and do but question six. So what are the key technologies that your organization uses to manage your information governance activities and why are they needed? So for us, we have predefined policies and what we do with that policies, we do a regular audit on the policies. Do we still need that process? Should we adopt it? Should we change it? And so on. And this is also, it's kind of a wheel, it's a spinning wheel. Define the process, look at it, look at it again, fail, fail better and then we define it. Yeah, you know, as you know, I'm a huge advocate for formal governance groups, especially around this topic area. It's something that, and I know that I, hey, I am not a fan of meetings for the sake of meetings and putting bureaucracy, that's not what it's about. When I have organized many different companies and ran governance bodies around information technology, the first couple months where we're meeting regularly, there are long, hard-fought battles around decisions. As we go down, as we mature, we get past that process. And when people start trusting the change management model, if you're transparent about the, like these are submit questions or issues. Here's their, they are reviewed. We have the right stakeholders that are in place. We discuss these policies. So if the one team within a business unit wants to make a change, we look and say, that sounds great, that sounds great, that sounds great. Somebody says, wait a second, from the compliance team or security team, here's why we're doing this way, we can't change that. Here's the rules. And so when that process is transparent and the end users are the teams that are asking for that change, then understand, oh, I didn't realize that was why we can't do it that way. But this is what we need as end users. What can we do? Well, here's a workaround or here's the way we can do it, but there's additional governance or management of this because of the compliance. So we can remain compliant, but let you get your work done. When you, here's a Buckleyism, a phrase I always use, is that the more that you involve people in the process, the more likely they will follow the process. So if you're transparent, if you're working out loud, go back to school days of elementary, it's like, show your work. Let's see how you came to that. If you're open and transparent with that, people are more accepting of the decisions that are made, even if they disagree with that. Exactly, and also I'm a big fan of governance boards. Because that means you get a lot of flavors and different opinions into one decision. And also it helps you to, so if you think about Microsoft 365 and having a governance board, otherwise it would be driven by IT operations. And they would drive it like a technical service. It's like, oh, I don't like that feature, toggle off. That's it. Right, which is the case in, unfortunately, the majority of what we're talking about, these systems, these tools, SharePoint teams, collaboration, information management systems, it's largely IT driven. Not to say that they can't be thoughtful and build and run these systems like that, but it needs to be driven by the business. Yeah, also think about it's not only IT driven, it's probably executive driven. Oh, I want that feature, turn it on. Yeah, well that's why there was a sidebar conversation during the tweet jam about having executive sponsorship and having the right amount of sponsorship, both to empower the governance body to be able to make the decisions. So you have stakeholders, somebody representing compliance, somebody representing marketing, whatever each of the constituencies, having the ability to make decisions. If you're sitting in a governance body and somebody just says, well, you know what, I'm gonna have to go and get approval on that. They may not be the right person if they're not able to make the decision on behalf of their business unit, then they may not be the right person for it. So yeah, I mean, there are a lot of other tools and things that are out there for manage this. I mean, there are tools that you use when you go and do the discovery process and that analysis. There are analytics tools to look at the usage. How are people actually, we just rolled out we're piloting this, especially during the pilot. Okay, how has this changed? What was our baseline of usage of that information? Beforehand, we've made the changes. Now, what's the usage look like? Have we seen a spike? Has it improved over time? Has it dropped off and why? So those are measurements as well. Yeah, exactly. And also it's kind of the same very often my discussions about that people want to direct communication channels. And you can't do that. You can't force people to use only that channel if it doesn't work for them right now. Yeah. Well, one of the things I will say, and as working for an ISV that has solutions, I mean, there's one of the problems of Microsoft 365 and looking this that really does spread across all of the workloads within Microsoft 365 because your intellectual property sits across all of those things is that managing those, corralling in activities, tracking behaviors, finding things that people are doing incorrectly and then going and trying to correct it and change things. It's distributed across multiple admin panels. It's complex. It's messy. And then you're talking about other analytics and third party tools around that. And so that's why there are ISVs. I don't say AppPoint does this as well. That does a great job of centralizing those things. So just be aware of as you're building out and looking at as you're scaling this, how are you gonna do that in a reasonable, manageable way? You can't just go hire dozens of people to be an admin over these things. You need to think about how do we automate? And there's tons of tools and let's say out of the box, power platforms not out of the box, but you can go and build things. There are, if you've got PowerShell script experts that could go and do a lot of these things, there's a lot that you can do to streamline the measurement of these systems. And you can buy third party tools. That does all that. Yeah. So the last one is, I always like this one and see the feedback from folks. What are some real world lessons learned and best practices for sustainable information governance? So my best practice sharing would be that you start with a solution which has enough user support first. So that people really understand why they are doing that. What is the outcome? Why they should change? Because you also know people don't want a change in their working habits or business processes that they had before. So they also need to find an advantage what's in for them if they work in another way. So that would be my lessons learned here. I like that too, because that kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier of understanding culturally, like what are some of the standards? Why are people doing some of those things? And it may be sometimes that they bring, like, look, I've always done it this way and they just need to be educated, reeducated on, hey, well, there's a better way of doing this and leveraging the technology, the platform. Let it do the heavy lifting rather than your manual of processes, for example. But sometimes it's just, okay, we could go and just deploy this out of the box method, but now that I understand why you're doing it the way that you're doing it, that may change then the way that you design your system. Exactly, and also very often people are afraid of making up to fail and to do something wrong. And the other side, this is what a small group of people trying something out is for, that you see what works, what doesn't work and where we should change the process. So this is also something, if you start small, if you see how people work, if you explain it to them, it will be a successful project, but it will take longer, then you probably expect it out of a, okay, we need to finalize that till end of the year. Well, you see, that's a fallacy, you'll go and put in the project management hat on, is that it'll take longer in the startup process, doing the multiple pilots, slowly growing that, folding the learnings. But if you look at every project I've ever been on of the last 30 years is when you take those steps, then you have fewer failures on the back end, when it takes more time and it's more expensive to fix mistakes that you would have caught by piloting several times. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's one of those that, no matter how much you and I say that, companies are just like, oh, we don't have the time for that, we'll reduce from four weeks to one week for testing, because just don't build failures in the system, just don't make mistakes. You're coding, I mean. Yeah, and also if you have project managers involved, they go crazy. Okay, what is the timeline? What should we do there? And always when I start those kind of projects with customers, I said, okay, it's not gonna be expensive, but it will take a long time. And this is what they very often don't want to hear. Yeah, that's a, yeah, I don't know how you combat that. Especially when, as a consultant, as an outsider, you're saying it's gonna take more time around that. It's like, again, it goes back to that comment, it's like, well, but you're the expert. There's a great video series that's out there, there's a group that they did called The Expert. If you've not seen this, it's fantastic. They have the whole thing about the red line and can you give us the red line? But can you make the red line green? No, it's not possible. Ways, of course, it's a simple request to make a red line that's green. It's like, no, it doesn't make any sense. It's a fantastic video if you've not seen that. But so much of that, having that discourse and going through and piloting, I think very quickly, in my experience, very quickly organizations then start to see the benefits when they start to see, oh, we caught that. And you can even go back and say, this is something that we may not have caught further down and it would have cost us. So I don't know, do you spend any time going back and kind of, as you're working with a client to say, it's like, point out, I just saved you a lot of money here. This is why smart to do this, why I was right. If you are in a long-term relationship and if you're in a long-term relationship with a client and also if you're built trust with a client, you can say those things. Sometimes it just doesn't work that way and you know that. Yeah, well, that's why there have been a number of times when I've refused to take on good paying projects when I was an independent consultant that I just said, you guys aren't willing to take the right steps and that'll become a nightmare for me and I don't think I'm the right person for this project. There's a nice way of getting out of that. I don't have the bandwidth for dealing with that. Yeah, exactly. Well, Martina, really appreciate you again for participating in the Tweet Jam as always and for everybody for joining. Really, this is something we've been doing it for almost 11 years now. I continue to enjoy doing these and having all of these voices come in and share their experiences. You can join us again. The next one will be on October 25th of 2022 and the topic will be why do some companies struggle with moving to the cloud? That'll be interesting. I'm looking forward to that feedback. Yeah, it's amazing that there's still so much on-prem that's out there and we're gonna dig into some of the whys. Be great. Well, Martina. I'm looking forward to that. I hope to have you there and thanks so much and we'll talk to you soon. Yeah, see you soon.