How have you, if at all, separated data, information & records management?

I am seing the role(s) in data governance taking shape, taking its place and being on try. Some people and some business area thinks differently; some will say IM and RM is DG, some tend to say it is more technical and technological and belongs to the world of IT. As we know, DG has multiple components, one that is more about the people and this is certainly not IT, more about policies, and this is IM, it is about tools and this is definitely IT. It's a mix and I think the variety of positions and competencies will lead the data governance function to success in an Organization. 

In my experience across many clients over the years, I've seen a mix. The majority do have them separated, they're separate teams. Not so much information and records management, which tend to be one team (sometimes called a Records Management Team, sometimes called Information Management). But you don’t just have one data team. You have multiple data teams doing different things. 

If we're talking about data governance, because that's more aligned to information and records management, then you would usually have that separate. Occasionally, I've seen data governance being done at a reasonable level of maturity, and then the organization realized that they were using similar principles for data as for information or records, so they have merged the teams into one.

And then I have seen it happen where, because there isn't already a team that does information or records management and they've asked the data governance team to take that on. I have seen that work well because it's the same principles behind what you're trying to do. It's really good if you can align the approach and instead of having a data owner and information owner, you just choose one role title and make them accountable for both.

So I've seen it work well both ways, but if they are separate, I think you do need to make sure the two teams are aligned and there's no gaps or duplicate effort between them.