Even in today’s digital world, documents proliferate in every part of an organisation – from accounts management (invoices, checks, and remittances) and human resources (employment applications and benefits forms) to engineering and manufacturing (design documents) and sales and marketing (sales plans and marketing collateral). Documents remain a key vehicle for making transactions and business processes work, and so document management continues to be a challenge. Optical character recognition (OCR) was the initial answer to many document-management woes, but in the age of big data analytics, OCR shortcomings can result in bad analytics.

If you are in charge of a company or organisation or even a large department, then you will have heard the term “information governance”, and you will have probably asked yourself: “What is it I need to know about this new field?” You will want an answer that is not just theoretical but practically relates the definition of information governance with your organization’s or division’s core tasks and responsibilities.