Challenges with Information Governance

Final Portfolio Project

Mohan Swamy Kadali

002847465

ITS-833-A05 Information Governance

University of the Cumberlands

Introduction

For my project portfolio, I choose to use the Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance company as the industry under review. It is a mutual life insurance company that serves five million clients and was founded in the year 1851 (Massmutual, 2020). The company is designed to provide support such as annuities, retirement plan services, life insurance, long term care insurance, and disability income insurance. The company has significant affiliates such as the Haven Life Insurance Agency and Barings LLC.

The selling of life insurance policies was caused by the non-forfeiture law, which was passed by the premiums. The premiums, however, were not received from the policyholders. And the various policies would only be converted to real-life policies and companies that were to cater for any claims of death that occurred during the term.

From the year MassMutual was founded, there have been considerable growth and diversification in the industry. For instance, the creation of a subsidiary, concert capital Management, aiming at overseeing endowment assets and retirements funds. Also, the company merged with another company in the year 1995, aiming at saving the operational costs. This allowed the company to save a considerable amount of money. Moreover, there was continued diversification in the industry, and more corporations were created (Massmutual, 2020). As a result, the company continued to collect a considerable amount of data from their customers.

For old financial service providers, the issue of big data is a big deal, since the company sits on terabytes of customers’ confidential information. The company has separate clusters, Vertical Enterprise Mode. The clusters were designed for intensive queries that were generated by the data scientists of the company. Also, another cluster was assigned to the API by scientists for accessing the customer account. The latter cluster requires responses that are sub-second queries.

Information governance challenges

In almost every organization, the use of information governance is a significant issue. It is accompanied by various challenges, which may be due to explosive growth in the content of an enterprise, first-gen records management tools complexity, and new regulatory demands. Thus, with the compliance risk and rising costs, there is a need to do something as an option. Several information governances’ challenges face MassMutual. The challenge of big data such that there cannot determine the rules and regulations to use, improper identification and classification of personally identifiable information, and ensuring compliance (Borgman et al., 2016). Also, since the company is almost carrying its operation globally, there is a challenge of the needs to determine the laws from other unions, countries, and regions apply. The personally identifiable information (PII) must be ascertained, and the PII’s life cycle requires to be established to meet the requirements. Moreover, the life cycle needs to be applied to the company while simultaneously gaining and utilizing the required benefits from the PII collected.

The company also lacks a proper Information Governance program that can assist in determining the infrastructure, appropriate tools, required workforce, and management for proper control and regulation of the data throughout the organization’s lifecycle (Brown & Toze, 2017). A suitable program can assist in guiding the company in determining the various needs and allow the incorporation of the entirely PII data requirements. Also, the organization is faced with control of accounts detail and the multiple processes. However, the data compliant management requirements must be configured and realized within the company’s working.

References

Borgman, H., Heier, H., Bahli, B., & Boekamp, T. (2016, January). Dotting the I and crossing (out) the T in IT governance: New challenges for information governance. In 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) (pp. 4901-4909). IEEE. Retrieved from https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7427795

Brown, D. C., & Toze, S. (2017). Information governance in digitized public administration. Canadian public administration, 60(4), 581-604. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/capa.12227

Insurance and Financial Services – Live Mutual – MassMutual. Massmutual.com. (2020). Retrieved 12 September 2020, from https://www.massmutual.com/.