More than half of organisations surveyed by AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) for a recent report on data governance have had data-related incidents in the past 12 months, including 16% suffering a data breach.

The new report, ‘Information Governance – too important for humans’, revealed that 45% of respondents feel a lack of Information Governance leaves their organisation wide open to litigation and data protection risks. Furthermore, 41% of respondents admit that their email management is ‘chaotic’ and 22% are reporting a negative financial impact from cases around electronic records.

“The sheer volume of data in business is a major asset for most organisations,” said Doug Miles, Chief Analyst, AIIM.

“But without effective information governance, that data also carries a potentially huge risk, both in terms of reputation and the bottom line. Lots of organisations are talking about information governance, but far less are actually doing it properly – that has to change in 2016.”

The severity and frequency of data incidents reported in the research has meant that Information Governance has never had more interest in it. For 28% of organisations, IG is very high on the senior management agenda and more than half (53%) have recently launched new IG initiatives.

The ever-growing amount of data has led to a renewed acknowledgement that using automation is essential for IG. 60% of respondents agree that automation is the only way to keep up with the volumes of electronic content, while 21% are already using automated declaration or classification of records.

Although cloud-based content and mobile access are by no means new initiatives for most organisations, this is yet to be reflected in many IG policies. Information retention, access security and data protection are covered by most respondents’ IG policies, but only 47% cover mobile access and mobile devices, including BYOD (39%). Only 36% have specific policies for cloud-based content sharing, while 57% say senior management are only interested when things go wrong.

“People readily acknowledge that their organisations’ IG policies are flawed and that automation is the future for effective IG,” continued Doug Miles, AIIM. “But this has not yet been borne out in the required changes to those policies – senior buy-in is absolutely critical to this – and along with automation, is the most important factor in improved Information Governance that more accurately governs the modern ways of working with data.”

Enforcing the IG policy once created was named the biggest issue for 41% of respondents. Getting the right people interested and involved, particularly senior management, is the next issue (39%).

The research for ‘Information Governance – too important for humans’ can be downloaded here. The survey was taken using a web-based tool by 398 individual members of the AIIM community between September 04, 2015, and September 30, 2015.