Information Governance: The Importance of Analyzing and Cleaning your Data

With all the data accumulated in your company, it has become more and more difficult to separate the relevant data from the unusable data. That is why data analysis and cleaning remain essential. You should analyze them all and take into account how bad data can affect your information governance strategy.

Only Keep Useful Data

When you want to analyze and clean your data, you need to verify that all those that you have are relevant and that you have the right to have them. To perform this analysis, you must ensure that the information in your possession is necessary for your activity. For example, you have the postal addresses of all your customers. However, your company sells digital content as a download link. The buyer pays online and receives an order confirmation by e-mail. The address is therefore never used. In this case, this data is not relevant and must be deleted.

Process Sensitive Data

Processing sensitive data makes your information governance strategy more efficient. This is information that reveals alleged racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs or trade union membership, as well as the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the unique purpose of identifying a natural person. We also talk about data concerning health, the sex life or sexual orientation of a natural person. Concretely, you do not have the right to collect skin color in your offer request form simply out of curiosity.

You can only keep this type of information if the person has voluntarily and specifically expressed their consent, if they have made it public, if they make it possible to protect human life or if they relate to members of a political or religious association or organization, etc.

Control Access to Information

A fundamental point of this sorting of data is to check who has access to it. For instance, it would not be relevant for your secretary, who takes care of the commercial part of the company, to have access to the bank details of the employees. On the other hand, it is the kind of information to which the payroll officer must have access. It is therefore important that only people who legitimately need the data can access it.

Respect the Data Retention Period

You cannot keep someone’s personal information indefinitely. However, it is difficult to tell precisely how long you can keep your data. Indeed, it depends on your company, the purposes of the data collection and the legal obligations. For example, you will have to save billing information for 10 years according to the commercial code, even if a person is no longer a customer.

Related Posts