You've Invested In An Information Governance Framework. Now What Is Stopping You?

Enforcing an Information Governance (IG) framework is often hindered by cultural resistance, unclear ownership, technology fragmentation, and the sheer volume of data. Together, these barriers cause policy stagnation and limit enterprise-wide adoption.

Our conversations with records managers, information governance consultants and end users have demonstrated some clear blocking categories.

Cultural Resistance & Lack of Awareness: Employees often view IG protocols as bureaucratic roadblocks that hinder productivity rather than enable security. Without proper Data Literacy Programs, staff may ignore policies. However, many see these programs as another layer of unnecessary training and effort on top of an already over busy schedule and not core to what they need to do.

Insufficient Executive Sponsorship: When IG is treated as an IT-only technical exercise rather than a strategic business imperative, it struggles to secure the necessary funding, authority, and cross-departmental support.

Unclear Ownership & Accountability: A critical failure occurs when organisations lack designated data stewards. Without clear rules outlining who is responsible for data quality, lifecycle management, and privacy, accountability breaks down.

Data Silos & Fragmented Systems: Departmental fragmentation and legacy systems make it nearly impossible to enforce consistent data classification, retention, and deletion policies across an entire enterprise.

Over-restrictive or Misaligned Policies: Strict or poorly communicated governance rules often drive users to adopt "shadow IT" (unsanctioned personal spreadsheets and tools) to bypass protocols.

Anyone of these on their own is enough to derail the adoption, combined they are guaranteed to stop it in it's tracks.

How can you overcome these?

Three things to give some strong consideration and planning.

1. Make it worthwhile, there has to be a payback for people to adopt a change in their working practice. What's the payoff you'll give them in return for helping you implement the framework you've designed. Think of the smallest, simplest advantages they'll get, or look for tools that will give them this.

2. Make it simple, anything difficult to grasp or understand, or anything too demanding on time and effort is going to block adoption and change. Whatever you do, make it easy for people to begin to work with.

3. Make it visible, internal success stories on simple and worthwhile should be communicated clearly to help others slower to adopt an answer to why bother? Pick the use cases and stories, get them written and then start a rotation of those stories out to your community.

We're seeing that Information Governance is the gateway to success AI implementations in an organisation. Without clean data, you'll never get clean results. Proper Information Governance and Records Management is the starting step to a cleaner data pool.