What is Information Governance:

Information governance is a holistic approach to managing corporate information by implementing processes, roles, controls and metrics that treat information as a valuable business asset.
The goal of a holistic approach to information governance is to make information assets available to those who need it, while streamlining management, reducing storage costs and ensuring compliance.  This, in turn, allows the company to reduce the legal risks associated with unmanaged or inconsistently managed information and be more agile in response to a changing marketplace.
An important goal of information governance is to provide employees with data they can trust and easily access while making business decisions. In many organizations, responsibilities for data governance tasks are split among security, storage and database teams. Often, the need for a holistic approach to managing information does not become evident until a major event occurs such as a lawsuit, compliance audit or corporate merger.