Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | I N F O R M A T I O N G O V E R N E N C E 52 U S I N G M A R K E T I N G P R I N C I P L E S T O E F F E C T I V E L Y C O M M U N I C A T E Y O U R I N F O R M A T I O N G O V E R N A N C E P R O G R A M Positioning Your Product #1: Focusing on Solutions "Solution Selling" is a method used by sales professionals that takes focuses on a specific problem faced by their customer and highlights how their product can help solve it, rather than focusing outright on product itself. Luckily (for you at least), people in positions of leadership with significant responsibilities, your audience in this case, are not likely to be running low on problems they're trying to solve or goals they'd like to achieve. Zeroing in on what those are is the first step towards being able to 'solution sell' IG at the leadership table. Here are some examples of business problems and goals commonly faced by leadership and their correlating IG solutions: Business Problem: Decreased Productivity and Portability IG Solution: Effective IG requires less employee time spent trying to find the right information and improves cross-office collaboration and information portability. Strategic Goal: Increase Cost Savings/Decrease Spending IG Solution: IG can reduce the total cost of information ownership in many areas including: offsite storage, eDiscovery, data storage, real estate and more. Business Problem: Security and Privacy Concerns IG Solution: IG helps firms mitigate risk and ensure compliance with an evolving regulatory landscape with data centralization and defensible disposition. Strategic Goal: Maximized Data Assets/ Innovation IG Solution: IG aids with maximizing the value of information by supporting other firm functions including knowledge management, business intelligence and new business intake. Positioning Your Product #2: Going Where the Focus Already is Framing your IG initiatives through the lens of how they align with existing internal compliance efforts allows you to go where the attention of leadership already is, instead of competing for it with larger, more established and often better funded groups. Look for ways that your initiatives can support those efforts and propose unifying your messages (ex: IG reduces the overall footprint of what information security has to protect with a retention schedule and enforced disposition). You may find it's more productive to form an alliance. Looking Beyond Internal Stakeholders As the amount of sensitive data that firms create and maintain continues to grow, so do pressures from clients and regulators to protect and control that data at all times. While you may already be aware of any IG related requirements received in outside-counsel-guidelines, engagement letters and audit questionnaires, how confident are you that you truly understand what your client's expectations and demands are with regard to how their information is managed? While it's understandable for clients to expect you to be able to recall certain information throughout the course of an engagement, would they be surprised (perhaps unpleasantly so) to learn you still had their data long after that relationship ended? Even less ideally, what if that discovery was prompted by a data breach or unrelated litigation? To that end, IG plays a vital role in preserving both the trust of your clients and the reputation of your firm. Bottom line: client relationships are the bedrock of any successful firm, and their expectations can and should be leveraged to help create and reinforce the business case for IG. Promoting Your Product: Designing an IG Communication Plan Developing an effective internal communication strate to market your IG program, and IG itself, is an important first step towards planning how you'll engage with your audience. To both facilitate compliance and, more importantly, to ensure you're communicating the value of your program, establishing meaningful and

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