Stewardship vs Governance, is there a difference?

Early last year, Andrew White at Gartner asked the question When Information Governance and Stewardship Efforts Differ…do they?

He was dealing with the sort of grey line where two terms that almost equate to each other are used interchangeably or at least close to each other.

Information governance is something we concern ourselves a lot at Objective, so I was interested, and stewardship is something often talked about in Christian circles, so thinking about it in terms of information is also interesting.

Without just referencing online dictionaries/thesauri I would give the following definitions myself:

Information Governance
Information governance is concerned with ensuring that we govern the way our organisation creates, consumes, collects and stores the information necessary to fulfil our purpose. It has connotations of restrictions, rules, compliance and auditing. It emphasises controls, policies and risk analysis.

Information Stewardship
Information stewardship is concerned with ensuring that we derive value from the information our organisation creates, consumes, collects and stores. It has connotations of exploitation, efficiency, profiting and judging. It emphasises usefulness, ease of access and valuation.

I think you could implement either of these concepts and find you were not doing the other. Both are desirable, but their emphasis is slightly different and they may indeed be two sides of the same coin. Perhaps it’s the classic dichotomy between cost and revenue, or pessimism and optimism at work.

Update: I certainly don't think stewardship is '13 minutes a week' as this Gartner blog post suggests!

Collaborate 2014 Roundup

We just finished another Collaborate conference for Objective Corp's international customers and it was a great effort by all; staff, partners and customers included.

The amount of effort that goes into the event is extraordinary, but the payoff is an event that informs, excites and inspires our customers to get more value from their Objective products (ECM, ECC and Connect) and change the way their organisations impact the world.

A big part of that is helping them drive business process innovation so they can deliver better services and products to the public.

Something we are doing across our products is looking to deliver great user experiences, especially ones that are customised for our customers' organisations so that they are received by their end users with credibility.

One of the challenges that raises is what an old colleague of mine used to call the "pink flamingo effect":

This is the tendency of some people to go wild with any sort of HTML customisation and add what they assume is an attractive element (e.g. pink flamingos) to an otherwise functional page.

We can't prevent that altogether, but a big part of the move we're making is to educate customers about the sorts of things they should consider customising (logos, fonts, colours) and how to consider the user experience when customising things that we have carefully designed, such as our responsively designed sample email templates.

To that end the slide above was used to help explain the difference between user interfaces (UI) and user experiences (UX).

Edit: See more about UI vs UX at my colleague David Eade's blog.