Long Pham: It’s a Must to Incorporate IG into Your Company

ZL’s team has a wide variety of perspectives on information governance, brought on by different roles, experiences, and knowledge. For this post, I interviewed developer Long Pham about his opinions on information governance and a post-GDPR digital environment.

How do you see IG-related needs changing in the next couple of years?

I don’t know about how it’s going to be like in a couple of years, ‘cause I’m not an expert in it, but it seems like it’s now a must, really, to incorporate IG into your company, no matter how big or small the company size is. Now that data, privacy, and all that stuff, it’s becoming a thing now where there are rules enforced upon you to ensure that you have some sort of regulations to allow data to be used and taken properly. So in that sense I think by then I expect to see, if not everybody, most of the companies will have some sort of IG.

Cloud is becoming more popular with organizations. Do you think there’s any common mistakes or pitfalls companies make when trying to move their information governance plan to something more cloud-based?

There definitely will be issues taking your system from on-premise to cloud. There are a lot of things about the configurations, the setups, and all that stuff. With that, in terms of IG, I’m not too sure – The concept is similar, but how you go about doing it is a little different. But say, hey, you want to manage your thing in ZL, there’s going to be a different way to take the data to ZL, because now you’re using a different type of thing to connect from your ZL software to the actual thing that has mails.

On privacy legislation:

It’s very difficult to make sure that IG’s a thing when, say, in the EU region you have GDPR compassing everything. So any debates, any settlements, you go to GDPR, you play by the book and you settle it based on that. In the US, because it’s a different environment altogether, you have rules and things in place. But they’re just there, they don’t work together – they are different organizations that have rules. It’s not an encompassing set of rules.

I don’t know if it’s going to be an issue right now, but if we have some sort of problems or legal issues, big issues, then that hierarchy might pose some problems.

Would it be easier with the introduction of federal privacy legislation?

Personally, I think federal legislation should be the way to go here, though I don’t know if it’s going to be more effective for the US. For me, it’s better to have a consistent type of rule that everybody can follow. Now you might have different variations for states ‘cause they have different ways of doing things, but in general there must be something that everybody agrees with. There should be a common ground for everyone, and some variations for states. Compromise a little on the federal side so each state will have their diversion.

I'm a Bay Area native who enjoys writing about the endlessly fascinating field of information governance. In my spare time, I enjoy making board games, baking, and attempting to convince everyone I know to watch The Genius.