5 Key Steps to Achieving Effective Information Governance

Originally published August 10th 2023 and updated on December 10th 2025

Today, organizations create and accumulate information at a relentless pace, spanning SaaS applications, collaboration tools, endpoints, cloud storage, and legacy systems. Without a clear approach to governing that information, teams often run into familiar problems: inconsistent data quality, rising storage costs, security gaps, slow eDiscovery, and compliance risk.

Information governance is the framework that keeps information accurate, accessible, secure, and defensible throughout its lifecycle. In this guide, we’ll cover what information governance includes, why it matters, and the five practical steps to build and sustain an effective program.

Key Takeaways 

• Information governance keeps content usable, protected, retained appropriately, and defensibly deleted across its lifecycle. 
• Start with a focused assessment. Start small and prioritize. Target the highest-risk repositories, data types, and pain points first. 
• Governance succeeds when ownership is clear: define roles, decision forums, and a simple operating model. 
• Policies must be enforceable, not aspirational, especially for access, retention, disposal, and legal holds. 
• Technology turns strategy into repeatable behavior through classification, retention, DLP, auditing, and automation. 
• Measurement matters: track risk reduction, compliance coverage, operational efficiency, and adoption. 
• The goal is a sustainable rhythm: prove value quickly, iterate, and expand. 

Understanding Information Governance 

Good information management is essential for maintaining trust in your data, meeting regulatory obligations, and reducing operational and legal risk. An effective information governance program helps you: 

• Know what you have (and where it lives)
• Control who can access it
• Apply retention and disposal consistently
• Reduce the blast radius of incidents like breaches or accidental sharing

Information governance is often described as an umbrella that includes: 

• Data Governance (definitions, quality, ownership, metadata, lineage) 
• Records Management (retention schedules, disposition, legal holds) 
• Privacy (handling personal/sensitive data in line with applicable laws) 
• Cybersecurity (confidentiality, integrity, availability, monitoring) 

These disciplines overlap in the real world, which is why governance works best as a coordinated program rather than a collection of disconnected initiatives. 

What is Information Governance? 

Information governance is the set of people, policies, processes, and technology used to manage information across its lifecycle: from creation and collaboration through storage, access, retention, and deletion. 

It’s closely related to data governance, but broader. If you’re comparing the two, this breakdown of information governance vs. data governance is a helpful reference. 

The Benefits of Information Governance 

A strong information governance framework delivers measurable outcomes across compliance, security, legal, and day-to-day operations. It reduces uncertainty around what data you have, where it lives, who can access it, and how long it should be kept. 

Key benefits include: 

Enhanced data integrity: Improves accuracy and reliability by reducing duplication, inconsistencies, and “multiple versions of the truth.” 

Regulatory compliance: Supports consistent handling of information to meet legal and regulatory obligations (e.g., retention, auditability, privacy requirements). 

Risk mitigation: Lowers legal and security risk through clearer policies, controlled access, regular reviews, and defensible processes (including legal holds and disposition). 

Efficient information management: Streamlines storage and retrieval so teams can find what they need faster, reduce clutter, and control storage growth. 

In practice, these outcomes translate into faster eDiscovery, fewer audit findings, and less time spent searching for or cleaning up information. 

The 5 Key Steps to Effective Information Governance 

With that foundation, let’s walk through the steps you can use to plan, implement, and improve information governance in a realistic way. 

1) Assess Your Information Governance Needs 

The most common reason governance programs stall is trying to “boil the ocean.” Instead, start by understanding your current state and focusing on the biggest risks. 

A strong assessment typically covers: 

• Information inventory: where data lives (apps, drives, repositories, databases) 
• Lifecycle review: creation → collaboration → storage → access → retention → deletion 
• Regulatory exposure: what laws/regulations apply, and what obligations they create 
• Security posture: access controls, sharing risks, encryption, monitoring, and incident response readiness 
• Operational pain points: eDiscovery delays, DSAR bottlenecks, duplicate data, storage growth 

Doing this work protects your business from quantitative and qualitative risk. For example, GDPR enforcement has been trending upward, making compliance readiness a consistent priority for many organizations. 

Practical steps to assess needs: 

1. Run a data discovery and classification exercise to identify data sources, data types (including personal/sensitive data), and obvious “shadow IT.” 
2. Conduct a data quality and access audit (duplicates, inconsistent formats, over-permissioned areas, public links, orphaned owners). 
3. Document key risks and opportunities across privacy, security, compliance, and operational efficiency. 
4. Map your top use cases (eDiscovery, retention cleanup, secure collaboration, DSAR response, breach readiness). 
5. Create a prioritized roadmap that targets high-impact areas first (usually a small set of repositories and data types). 

2) Define Ownership, Roles, and Operating Model 

Information governance is as much a people-and-process program as it is a technology program. Before you choose tools or write detailed policies, define who is responsible for what. 

Common roles to establish: 

• Executive sponsor: removes obstacles, funds the program, sets business priorities 
• Information governance lead: coordinates policy, stakeholders, and implementation 
• Data/Records owners: accountable for content in specific systems or domains 
• Legal & Compliance: defines defensibility requirements (legal holds, retention exceptions) 
• Security & IT: ensures controls, monitoring, and access policies are enforceable 
• Business stakeholders: represent how information is created and used day-to-day 

A simple operating model often includes:

• A governance council (monthly/quarterly decisions) 
• A working group (weekly execution) 
• Clear RACI for policies, retention schedules, exceptions, and approvals 

3) Develop an Information Governance Strategy (Policies + Priorities) 

Now translate your assessment into a strategy your organization can actually execute. A good strategy connects governance goals to business outcomes. 

Key steps: 

1. Define clear goals aligned to business priorities, e.g., data privacy, security hardening, quality improvement, or regulatory compliance. 

2. Identify your highest-value use cases (for many orgs: retention cleanup, eDiscovery readiness, DSAR response, and secure sharing). 

3. Create and standardize policies for: 

• Data classification and labeling 
• Access control and least privilege 
• Retention schedules and defensible disposal 
• Legal holds 
• Approved repositories and data handling rules 

4. Build a training and change-management plan so teams understand the “why” and the “how.” 

5. Define exceptions and escalation paths (because there will always be edge cases). 

4) Implement Effective Data Management Systems (and Controls) 

Technology is what turns your strategy into repeatable behavior. Your goal is to support governance by making the right thing easy and the risky thing harder. 

What to focus on: 

1. Assess system requirements based on volume, complexity, integrations, and your priority use cases. 
2. Choose tools that fit your environment (scalability, integration, search, reporting, automation). 
3. Enforce security controls such as encryption, access controls, conditional access, auditing, and alerting. 
4. Integrate systems where it matters (e.g., connecting identity, DLP, retention, and discovery capabilities). 
5. Improve data quality and hygiene with deduplication, standardization, validation rules, and owner assignment. 

Examples of “governance-enabling” capabilities: 

• Data classification and labels (manual + automated) 
• Retention policies applied by location, label, or content type 
• Legal hold workflows that preserve relevant data 
• DLP policies for sensitive data and risky sharing 
• Centralized auditing and reporting

5) Monitor, Measure, and Continuously Improve 

Information governance isn’t a one-and-done project. Regulations change, systems change, and the business changes, so governance must be actively maintained. 

What to Monitor:  

• Policy compliance: are retention and access policies applied where intended? 
• Security signals: risky sharing, spikes in downloads, unusual access patterns 
• Lifecycle adherence: content aging, stale repositories, orphaned ownership 
• Operational KPIs: time to fulfill DSARs, time to collect data for eDiscovery, number of legal hold issues 

Define KPIs that map directly to your goals. Good KPI categories include: 

• Data quality: accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness 
• Risk reduction: decrease in public links, decrease in over-permissioned repositories, fewer policy exceptions 
• Compliance performance: audit findings, retention coverage, timely disposition 
• Operational efficiency: faster eDiscovery/DSAR response times, reduced manual work 
• Adoption: training completion, policy acknowledgments, usage of approved repositories 

Review KPIs on a regular cadence (monthly/quarterly), and use them to drive improvements, new controls, updated training, policy refinement, and technology enhancements. 

Conclusion 

Effective information governance turns information chaos into something you can defend, manage, and actually use. When you start with a focused assessment, define clear ownership, create enforceable policies, implement practical controls, and continuously measure results, governance becomes a repeatable operating rhythm, not a one-time cleanup.

Use the five steps above as your blueprint, but keep the mindset simple: govern what matters first, prove value quickly, and iterate. That’s how governance moves from “compliance work” to a business advantage that reduces risk, speeds response, and lowers long-term cost.

At Cloudficient, our approach to information governance focuses on eliminating data silos, reducing compliance risk, and lowering cost by pairing clear governance decisions (what to keep, where to store it, who can access it, and when to delete it) with AI-powered classification, automated workflows, and a cloud-native architecture.

When you’re ready to operationalize that approach, Expireon delivers cloud-native archiving with complete data ownership (no vendor lock-in). It integrates natively with Microsoft 365 (Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams), Slack, and 300+ other tools, and it automatically preserves hyperlinked documents by capturing the closest-in-time version. Helping teams maintain audit-ready access during investigations and litigation while reducing downstream review costs. 

FAQ 

1) What’s the difference between information governance and data governance? 

Information governance is broader: it covers how information is created, accessed, retained, and defensibly deleted across systems (including unstructured content like files, email, and chats). Data governance typically focuses more on structured data concepts like definitions, quality, ownership, and lineage. 

2) Where should we start if we’re overwhelmed by the amount of content we have? 

Start with a focused assessment of your highest-risk areas: a few key repositories (like Microsoft 365 or collaboration tools), your most sensitive data types, and the use cases that create the most pain (eDiscovery, DSARs, risky sharing, or retention cleanup). Then prioritize a short roadmap that proves value quickly. 

3) How do we make retention and deletion defensible (not just “cleanup”)? 

Defensible deletion requires consistent policies, clear ownership, auditability, and repeatable workflows, plus legal hold processes that preserve relevant information when needed. The goal is to keep what you must, delete what you can, and be able to show how and why decisions were applied.