'Seize the day' and lead the way for a successful information program.

• Author: Wiler, Vicki
• Position: IN FOCUS: A Message from the Editor - Editorial

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This issue's articles reinforce the imperative of seizing even creating--opportunities to collaborate with other information governance (IG) stakeholders to ensure that your organization's information is successfully governed and managed.

In their cover article, Susan Cisco, Ph.D., CRM, FAI, and Sue Trombley, IGP, FAI, provide a number of innovative ideas for "making IG happen," and they all involve records and information management (RIM) professionals taking the lead in collaborative projects with IG stakeholder groups, including legal, compliance, audit, IT, and lines of business leaders. In five case studies, they share how RIM professionals were able to leverage business disruptions and collaborate internally and externally to improve information availability, streamline processes, ensure compliance, control risks, and protect intellectual assets in their organizations.

Another feature article, by Ben Greene, CRM, underscores the importance of working with IT if one of your RIM goals is to reduce the volume of e-mail saved as personal storage table (PST) files on users' local drives. While IT may have been behind the prevalent practice of storing Outlook e-mails as PST files, you can cut the expense and difficulty of managing these files by following Greene's advice in "Quarterbacking a PST Reduction Project: How to Get to the End Zone--No Matter the Opposition."

Collaborating with IT is also important for those who want to automate systems as a way to improve the way their organizations manage information. Joao Penha-Lopes, Ph.D., describes the benefits of automation in reducing RIM risk in the Business Matters sub-feature that begins on page 38.

Close collaboration with key business units is necessary, too, for those who might want to borrow appraisal concepts from their archives colleagues and apply them to...