eDiscovery Daily Blog

eDiscovery Trends: ARMA International and EDRM Jointly Release Information Governance White Paper

 

A few months ago, the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) and ARMA International announced that they would be collaborating on information governance guidelines for eDiscovery.  It only took them a little over three months to release their first work product.

On December 20 of last year, ARMA and EDRM announced the publication of a jointly developed white paper entitled, How the Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM) Complements ARMA International’s Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles (GARP).  The press release announcing the release of the white paper can be found on the EDRM site here.  The web version of the paper is located here and the PDF version can be downloaded here.

The core of the paper is to relate the EDRM Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM) to ARMA’s GARP® principles.  There are eight GARP principles, as follows:

  1. Accountability
  2. Transparency
  3. Integrity
  4. Protection
  5. Compliance
  6. Availability
  7. Retention
  8. Disposition

The white paper provides a chart for assigning ownership to each business unit for each GARP principle and describes the Maturity Model with five levels of effective Information Governance, ranging from Level 1 (Sub-standard) to Level 5 (Transformational).  Transformational describes “an organization that has integrated information governance into its overall corporate infrastructure and business processes to such an extent that compliance with the program requirements is routine”.  Based on the CGOC Information Governance Benchmark Report from a little over a year ago, most organizations have quite a bit of maturing still to do.

The white paper then proceeds to describe each of the eight principles “According to GARP” at Level 5 Transformational Maturity.  Where’s Robin Williams when you need him?  The white paper finishes with several conclusions noting that “the IGRM complements the metrics defined by ARMA International’s Information Governance Maturity Model”.

This white paper provides a great overview of both the IGRM and ARMA GARP principles and is well worth reading to develop an understanding of both models.  It will be interesting to see how the EDRM and ARMA joint effort proceeds from here to help organizations achieve a higher level of “maturity” when it comes to information governance.

So, what do you think?  Have you read the white paper yet?  Do you think the EDRM/ARMA collaboration will lead to greater information governance within organizations?  As always, please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic!

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.

print