You’re considering setting up federated information management but don’t know how it works? Here are the five steps to federation.

Want to find out where your data resides? Get a personalised report here.

1.Connect and discover

The first step is to connect to existing information silos and find out what’s in there. Fortunately, technology like Objective 3Sixty has given us the tools and techniques to discover and connect that information. Once you’ve made sense of the data you have, APIs and integration techniques connect content, processes, and line of business applications, and administrators can choose to continue to manage the data in place or move it to a new location.

2. Organise and analyse

Once you understand the information you have, you can start to organise. Do you need to get rid of redundant, obsolete, and trivial information that’s bogging you down? Do you want to migrate information to a different repository for longterm retention or enhanced security? Once the clutter’s reduced machine learning and other capabilities can review, cleanse, and enrich information by removing duplicates, tagging sensitive personal information, identifying redundant or trivial records, updating metadata and more. Federation helps you find, organise, and analyse content independently of the source.

3. Automate and Improve

Automation is a useful technique to improve workflow and customer satisfaction. Employees are relieved of mundane and manual tasks and are allowed to place their attention on more value-added activities. Federation combined with AI-assisted tools helps organisations to correctly classify information and work to automate records retention so that information governance happens independently and in the background of day-to-day processes. Automation then ensures that information managers are not constantly cleansing the data as it is generated. This results in less burden on information managers and knowledge workers over time.

4. Federate, baby!

Ultimately, federation allows you to leave data in the systems where it’s relevant but bring a holistic approach to how it’s viewed and governed, increasing compliance and security overall. A federated approach creates a digital information register that avoids unnecessary duplication of information, systems, and processes, giving better visibility and control of critical data, better access to information for process efficiency and customer service, and streamlines content that’s completed its lifecycle from multiple repositories.

5: Move forward

It’s no longer enough to assume we can manage all of our information in a “single source of truth.” Rather, it’s more realistic to recognise that information is everywhere, and then manage those pieces in a more holistic and unified way. A Federated approach works to help simplify data management, and when used correctly, saves time and money and ensures higher levels of governance, which means higher levels of public trust.

Want to find out where your data resides? Get a personalised report here.

What if you had a single view of your data? Read more about Objective 3Sixty.

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