Author—Galina Datskovsky
The ARMA Information Governance Principles are very relevant to today’s world of mobile communications. There are 8 of them all together, and in this blog series we will discuss 7 of them in detail. In our last two blogs we discussed the principles of protection, availability and compliance.
This one will be focused on Integrity and Transparency.
The Principle of Integrity: An information governance program shall be constructed so the information generated by or managed for the organization has a reasonable and suitable guarantee of authenticity and reliability.
The Principle of Transparency: An organization’s business processes and activities, including its information governance program, shall be documented in an open and verifiable manner, and that documentation shall be available to all personnel and appropriate interested parties.
In terms of Integrity, it is important to know where the information came from, who the parties involved are, as well as other information that guarantees a degree of authenticity and reliability. For example, if I pick up another person’s device to text, the appearance of authenticity is there, however, the information can really be coming from a third party. There is no guarantee that the sender is who the device indicates. To rely on mobile text as a record, it is important to ensure that there is a level of authentication that prevents unauthorized parties from sending information and ‘imitating’ authentic communication. Login and user authentication, organizational structure and integrity, additional organizational password policies for corporate mobile partition, all help to ensure data authenticity and integrity.
Having a separate channel of communication for business purposes, separate from personal communications, can also help as well. Further, if a copy of the communication is essential, capturing the right meta data ensures preservation of the authentic record and provides reliable information even in the secondary system of record that contains the communication until its final disposition.
This brings us to the principle of Transparency, which really goes well together with the principle of Integrity. Transparency in an organization is often perceived as incongruous to security and privacy. However, capturing a record of all communication, including text with the right metadata, ensures integrity of the mobile enterprise and allows an organization to operate in a transparent manner. This provides a single source of truth for discovery, FOIA requests and other searches with the appropriate need to know limitation.
There are 5 easy steps to help your organization ensure information integrity and transparency when considering enterprise mobile communications:
- Do not assume that text and chat compromise Integrity and Transparency
- Do allow text messaging via a secure, encrypted texting application that meets your compliance requirements
- Keep a single copy of the communication for compliance reasons and to ensure your ability to be transparent
- Make the information available ONLY to the right people
- Set up policies for text messaging up front and get in front of the problem. Don’t let this become another email crisis before addressing it.
In short, as we have said before, go ahead, embrace secure text messaging for your business needs, do it wisely and you will not regret it.
In fact, your business will flow faster, more efficiently and you will remain in compliance. Further, you will be able to operate in a more transparent and secure manner while communicating with confidence in our fast-paced, ever-increasing mobile world.
To find out more about how secure messaging can help you enforce information governance principles at your organization and further benefit your mobile workforce contact us.