Speaker 1: So we're both at the end of the alphabet. What do you think about that? And we've known each other for a very long time.

Speaker 2: Very long time.

Speaker 1: And we will not bore you with the details about our history. You can read them. And I don't even think they were in the app, were they? Okay. So do you want to say anything else about yourself?

Speaker 2: No, it's me. You guys have seen me on stage yesterday. I think you've probably talked with Susan this week. So hi.

Speaker 1: So what we're talking about today is our lessons learned. This is kind of real life in that overall information governance world. And just to kind of make this a little bit fun, but one of the things that we always say and many people have already heard me say this today and yesterday. It's all about people, process, and technology.

Speaker 2: And people. People is the really important part of that. So don't forget that one.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So we're going to go through and we're going to kind of talk about some of those inside lessons. Executive support. And this is from my real time. He did introduce us as being at IBM. We were both at IBM now. But we actually worked together.

Speaker 2: She was my boss in a former life.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. So we worked together. So we've really done a lot of this stuff before moving to IBM. So executive support. And that's just one of those lessons learned that when you've got it, you've got it. And you have to have it. I wish I could share better news that if you don't have some kind of level of executive support that you would still be able to streamline a program and move it forward. But you need that top person. You need at least that C-level person to really support what you're doing.

Speaker 2: And if you can find someone that's in the business, maybe not necessarily your senior leadership, that certainly helps. But if you can find and relate to someone where we used to work at one point, we worked in insurance. Finding someone that was in the benefits organization or maybe underwriting was extremely valuable to have someone at the C-suite to support your cause. Because it was coming from their perspective, not only yours.

Speaker 1: And I just want to say that picture, that was literally two executives. The gentleman on the right was literally one very quiet but very influential in our organization and agreed to dress up and do a skit in front of all management in our organization. So you never know what will happen. The next thing is champions. Those champions. A little bit different than your executive support. But what people really in your organization really, really believe in what you're trying to accomplish, what your goals are, and where you're going with it. And I say that because we had an interesting way, the last company I was at, to get some champions to really help. We actually hired an outside consultant that was more of a professional organizer. And she said, let me help you, give you more time in your day, let's help you with some organization things. Nothing, nothing about information governance. It was all about helping them be better in some very general terms. And it was amazing the success she had. Granted, it was her, a lot of it was her. But that success made those people such believers that they became our champions.

Speaker 2: Where I worked before I came to IBM, we had a nice run towards making things happen. That was my boss's nice little logo. Let's just make it happen. And having those champions in the business, along with having a senior C-suite person from the business to support the effort was huge. One thing, and I know it's on the slide, but we as records managers, IG, consultants that work internally, try and nix the industry lingo. Just records management, okay, great. The terminology that we use, they don't get it. They don't understand it. And you have to explain it. So try and find terms that they can relate to, to their business, to their process. Because it's going to actually resonate with them. Oh, I can save you time by doing X? Oh, okay. That makes sense. Thank you for helping. So just try and find something that really relates to them and they can identify with.

Speaker 1: Which really takes us to our next lesson about educate, educate, educate, communicate, address change, and make the education fun. The place where we work together, we actually, way back when, it was about email management. And we actually, with the help of our marketing department, produced a really funny five-minute video about email management. And everybody loved it. And that got them to training. Because the first group comes in, they go through the training, and they're telling all their peers about, oh, you've got to go, you've got to see that video. And so, make it fun.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So quick question, and I chose the slide picture. How many of you are parents? Good portion. Okay. Great. So when it comes to educate, communicate, we as parents are those leaders for our children. I'm a parent, Susan's a parent. If we don't provide that guidance and provide that communication back to our kids, they, yes, will always have to find their own path. I have a 19-year-old that is trying to find his. But we have to help them along the way. And I see that no different when it comes to the folks in our organizations to help them along that path as well. We have to be the ones to educate them. We have to be the ones to educate management. And if we're not communicating and over communicating and knowing our audience, change up your communication style based on your target audience. I don't know how many times Susan had told me that when I worked for her. And it was in my review, Donda, know your audience. It's so true. It's so true. Because at that C-suite, make it short and sweet to the point. But when you're talking to folks that are on the ground, you need to make it relatable to them and communicate to them often what the change is going to be. And if you only do it once or twice a year, it's not really going to help you in your process. And it's more of a program. It's not really a project because it's an ongoing thing.

Speaker 1: So another inside lesson was getting back to that person, that executive sponsor is you've got to have some level of measurement and reporting. We forget about that, I think, sometimes. Even in a program, you still have to measure your progress. You have to report on it. You have to sell yourself. And you have to show that progress. But you can't make it super complicated. That was probably, along the lines, one of the hardest things for me was to say, wow, look what we've accomplished. Look what we've done. That's not in my nature. I'm not a good bragger, except when it comes to my grandkids now. So that just wasn't in my nature. That was one hard thing for me to learn. But I learned quickly how important that was.

Speaker 2: I think the measurement and reporting is where a lot of people struggle. I know when I was working on my team and we were rolling out a structured data archiving project, which was so fascinating to be on, mind you, that trying to give a picture and words to senior leadership about where we were going and what we had accomplished. Where we were going is great, because you always have that roadmap. But show me the progress along the way and put those into numbers, if you will. And they wanted to see those numbers. So we found some ways to do that. But try and find opportunities to measure your success. And even if it's just we had five small teams that onboarded with the process, and here's what the result was. We had more people buy in. How many people bought in? You have to figure that out for yourselves. But one thing I would stress is start small and grow big. Because if you grow big, really, your target is really big at the beginning. There are a lot of times, and we probably all know this, you have those bumps in the road and it sets you back. So try and target your implementation, whether it's an implementation of a process or an implementation of a system. Try to think about what are the little measurements and milestones that we need to meet along that way to get to the ultimate goal, which is the grow big piece at the end. Oh, yeah. Make it fun. You want to start on that one? Sure. I'll start on this one. So we know that IG and records management and data management, process management, whatever it is that you're implementing can be a very dry subject to other people. People that are passionate and have been in the business for a really long time get the value and even then it's hard for us to figure out how the hell do we make this fun? This is crazy. So there was one time that we did, I think at my old job, yeah, we had the executives come down. We had basketballs with information management printed on them. We had a basketball hoop inside. We made games and prizes. We did online scavenger hunts, and if you found all the information, and sometimes that meant you literally had to go talk to a person within the information management privacy group to get the answer, and then they could submit their online form, and depending on certain criteria, you could win a Kindle or something. We tried to come up with and worked with marketing on some really creative ideas to bring the awareness about the project or the process, the implementation, whatever it was that we did that year.

Speaker 1: And one other example of that, you know, I had mentioned early on that video we had done, the company we were at together, but later when we were also implementing major changes that touched every person in the organization, ooh, yeah, and we were trying to, you know, it was never under the guise of information management, information governance, again, don't use the lingo, you know, unless you absolutely have to, but one person in our marketing department there, she was just so good that she would write these weekly columns in our online newsletter, and she would take the stance of, oh, my gosh, the sky is falling, and she would just kind of go off on these tangents, which is what people were thinking, and she got the highest readership, and people were looking forward to the next week. She was just a phenomenal writer, and we were so fortunate to get somebody that creative to help us along the way. So again, you can kind of see these things are taking similar direction. And so your governance and strategy, you know, you cannot leave it out. The strategy, you've got to have a strategy. That starts at the very, very top, and then you have to think about what it is going to include and what your structure is going to be. It's not a project. It starts off as a strategy. You may have initiatives to support that strategy, and those initiatives may have projects, but remember, it is overall that big picture. And your mission and your vision and, you know, and engaging people in your benchmark. So all of that kind of sums up what a lot of the things that we've been talking about. And I have to say, if you'll notice, we were saying inside. This one's probably outside looking in. Donda and I both in our new roles and working with organizations, that's one of the things we see. We see projects of people wanting to maybe implement a technology, but they're not looking at the holistic view.

Speaker 2: I think that holistic view is definitely where some are struggling with. Coming up with what is that strategy, what do we want this really to be for us? And I know a lot of times, whether it's within IT or if you have a really good internal consultant analyst, whatever, typically a business analyst that's very passionate about getting this thing up and running so that people can use it in a swifter process, et cetera, yes, it's a piece of software. But if you don't have those people behind you to support that, it's going to fail, guys. It just you'll stop and start, stop and start. So really think about do I have the people internally to support this? And if the answer is yes, for what your strategy is going to be and what those milestones are along the way, rock on. But if you know and you go into it and you know that you don't have those people, that's where the start small, grow big comes into play. Really think about what it is that you can accomplish within that year, within that six months, whatever that is. Start there, but don't try and boil the ocean.

Speaker 1: We have four minutes. So we have this one is, you know, this whole transition and maybe we're, you know, I still feel like I see this a lot, you know, a lot of retention schedules grew up in organizations from the concept of paper and they really you think about that from an event trigger, events versus triggers and trying to operationalize content and, you know, really everybody's talking about electronic records management, electronic governance on content. And so it's just brings, there's a whole new host, privacy, security, everything is such a change and we see people struggle trying to make that conversion right now. And then another part that we can't stress enough is rank your risk. That sometimes is a very valuable way to get started. Don't pick the thing that's the least risk for your organization. Think about what is really important to your organization. Sometimes our tendency is let's start, we want to start easy and we want to start small, but we got to have risk associated with that because that has the biggest impact on your success in the organization. So strongly encourage you to rank your risk.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I sat on a project, I mentioned earlier, structured data archiving project and this heat map thing that you'll see on the screen, it's not really from that project, but it really took a view of where's our risk from a privacy perspective, how does that relate back to our retention schedule and what was the most litigious. Those were the three things that we took to help rank. Well, I should say there's a fourth one in there as well or fifth. We looked at systems that may be in decommission mode and we also looked at, what was the other one? Oh, size. So if the data was causing production issues because it was just prolific, what can we offload that really should have been disposed of or can be archived because it's not accessed as much. So think about those things and it doesn't have to be structured data archiving, you can take the concept back to other things as well. So we can include quotes here, but I found this one a few years ago and it talks about just getting started and getting ahead. So break your complex, overwhelming task into smaller ones. Try to make them manageable for you, but not only you, think about the people that are going to have to help you get there and that's the people in the business. So think about that and maybe leverage that a little bit in your projects and your strategy. We don't have questions. I know. We're supposed to do that later. Unfortunately. Yeah. My cat. She just has this look and it sends questions. And my granddaughter. So we had to put some fun things in there too for us. So thank you all for attending. We appreciate it. Please come see us if you have questions. Have a great day. Bye.