Doing Information Right™

Bad dates and bad data can both leave you wondering why you trusted them in the first place.

In the first episode of Nattering Nabobs of Information, Bryant Duhon and Steve Weissman connect online dating, marketing, and information governance through a shared problem: figuring out who and what you can trust — and living up to the trust other people put in you.

Bryant brings lessons from the online dating salt mines. Steve brings the information governance perspective and, mercifully, considerably less recent dating experience.

Together, they tackle:

* Why your business needs to look like its profile photo.
* What earns trust between the first click and a lasting customer relationship.
* How to make the case for information governance beyond “something bad might happen.”
* Where AI fits into the conversation about trustworthy information.

If you’re trying to earn customers’ confidence or help colleagues trust the information they work with, there’s something here for you.

There are also questionable dating analogies, a Little League lesson, and instructions for not boiling the entire elephant.

Watch the conversation, then tell us in the comments:
--- What makes you lose trust in a business? ---

Talk to Bryant
Bryant Duhon helps businesses turn what they know into useful marketing content that earns attention, builds trust, and gives customers a reason to stick around. If you need help with newsletters, content strategy, or simply figuring out what the hell to say to your customers, get in touch.
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 301-275-7496

Talk to Steve
Steve Weissman helps organizations get control of their information so it’s trustworthy, findable, defensible, and actually useful to the business. If information governance, compliance, content management, or getting your information ready for AI is keeping you up at night, Steve is the guy to talk to.
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 617-383-4655

© Steve Weissman • All Rights Reserved • www. hollygroup.com • 617-383-4655

Most governance initiatives don’t stall because of technology — they stall because people aren’t aligned behind the effort. For many, the solution is to create a communities of practice that changed the trajectory of their programs. 

Have a listen and learn how leaders like you have structured their communities, sparked participation, and created the kind of cross‑functional momentum that makes governance stick.

* See our page on LinkedIn! * https://www.linkedin.com/company/infogovroundtable 

Your hosts: 
• Steve Weissman - [email protected] 
• Jesse Wilkins - [email protected] 
• Donda Young - [email protected]

© Steve Weissman • All Rights Reserved • www. hollygroup.com • 617-383-4655

Many organizational policies are written as a series of imperatives: do this, don't do that, always, never. While well-intentioned, this approach often leaves capable professionals feeling like children who have to be controlled rather than trusted. The result? Policies that are read reluctantly, followed inconsistently, and viewed as obstacles rather than guidelines.

This installment of our IG Community Roundtable explores the connection between policy tone and staff behavior, and explains how respectful, positively framed policies can encourage questions without fear of reprimand.

* See our page on LinkedIn! * https://www.linkedin.com/company/infogovroundtable 

Your hosts: 
• Steve Weissman - [email protected] 
• Jesse Wilkins - [email protected] 
• Donda Young - [email protected]

Book mentioned in this video: by Lewis Eisen
How to Write Rules That People Want to Follow, 3rd Edition: A guide to writing respectful policies and directives

https://www.amazon.com/Write-Rules-That-People-Follow-dp-1988749069/dp/1988749069/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

© Steve Weissman • All Rights Reserved • www. hollygroup.com • 617-383-4655

This IG Community Roundtable is an “Ask Us Anything” session in which the conversation was driven entirely by YOU. 
 
Think of it as nearly an hour of free consulting with three top resources – plus a bit of peer review – and you get the idea. Watch, learn, and enjoy!

* See our page on LinkedIn! * https://www.linkedin.com/company/infogovroundtable 

Your hosts: 
• Steve Weissman - [email protected] 
• Jesse Wilkins - [email protected] 
• Donda Young - [email protected]

© Steve Weissman • All Rights Reserved • www. hollygroup.com • 617-383-4655

If you’re reading this, then your to-do list probably includes tasks like updating your retention schedule, reducing paper, cleaning up your data stores, protecting privacy, boosting findability, etc.

But you can’t do any of these things without first knowing what information you have and where it’s stored – which is why you need to start by conducting an information inventory and drawing a data map.

This edition of the IG Community Roundtable will explores why this screamingly obvious bit of advice is so often (in our experience) given short-shrift, why the work is more than worth the psychic pain it can cause, and how to ease that pain for the people whose cooperation and input you need.

* See our page on LinkedIn! * https://www.linkedin.com/company/infogovroundtable

Your hosts:
•  Steve Weissman - [email protected]  
•  Jesse Wilkins - [email protected] 
•  Donda Young - [email protected]

© Steve Weissman • All Rights Reserved • www. hollygroup.com • 617-383-4655

If you’re exploring, piloting, or implementing AI, take note of this critical distinction when it comes to ingesting and leveraging information:

•  Citation: the information exists, and I can tell you where to find it
•  Provenance: the information exists, and I can tell you where to find it, where it originated, and when it arrived

Understanding the difference is foundational to getting practical value from AI, most instances of which cite their data sources but say nothing about whether those sources, or that data, is at all reliable.

Join me and John Martin, Founder & CEO of RedFile Technologies, in this edition of Speaking Of, in which we discuss the meaning and ramifications of a LinkedIn post he wrote on the subject.*

You really don’t want to miss it.

– Steve Weissman - [email protected] 
– John Martin - [email protected]

*Citation alert! "Why Citation Is Not Provenance" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-citation-provenance-john-martin-obske/?trackingId=iTtM6kVT2Y1me1APTa5xrA%3D%3D)

© Steve Weissman • All Rights Reserved • www. hollygroup.com • 617-383-4655

Creating policy documents takes an awful lot of effort. But are we making it harder on ourselves than we need to? Lewis Eisen of Perfect Policies says “yes,” and you need to hear why.

Spoiler: it’s because the people who should be focused on approving the policies spend too much time wordsmithing the user version – a job better left to those on the operational front lines.

Have a watch and you’ll agree that it’s 30 minutes of pure gold.

And if that’s not enough, there’s a free e-book in it for you as well! (See below.)

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The article that sparked this conversation:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/policies-organizational-legislation-lewis-eisen-jd-cip-ken9e/

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Highlights:

3:51 On whether people should even be reading policies

5:56 On separating docs that communicate policies from those where the policies are formed

6:53 On “marketing” your policies to facilitate compliance

9:03 On separating oversight and operations

11:48 On AI as an example

12:56 On trusting the specialists you’ve hired

16:34 On policies’ true intention

18:00 On culture change

24:50 On working through mission, then values, and then strategy

28:38 On Lewis’ free new book “Why Are Your Rules Yelling At Me?”

--

Get Lewis’ new book – downloadable for free!

“Why Are Your Rules Yelling At Me?”

https://lewiseisen.com/yelling 

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Steve Weissman - [email protected] 

Lewis Eisen - [email protected]

© Steve Weissman • All Rights Reserved • www. hollygroup.com • 617-383-4655

The most efficient and effective governance projects tend to be those that follow some sort of emergency: a breach, a lawsuit, a flood, etc. Hence the expression "never waste a crisis" – a phrase of which I was recently reminded by Cheryl Banke, CEO and Founder of Belvedere Consulting and my special guest in this episode of Speaking Of.

Have a watch and let us know what you think as we discuss scenarios and recommendations regarding:

- Paying attention to what's happening in the business 
- Paying attention to what's happening in technology
- Anticipating crisis points
- Thinking beyond just records

You'll be glad you did!

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Steve Weissman - [email protected] 
Cheryl Banke - [email protected]

© Steve Weissman • All Rights Reserved • www. hollygroup.com • 617-383-4655

You know how important metrics are to doing governance right. (If you don’t, have a watch of our May 2025 Roundtable on the subject!) But simply collecting them isn’t enough; rather, you have to ensure they are viewable, analyzable, and actionable on an ongoing basis, and reportable in easily-digested ways to senior executives and external overseers.

In practical terms, this means enhancing your dashboarding and auditing capabilities – twin requirements that are critical to the longevity of your program and are the subject of our next IG Community Roundtable.

Join us as we dive into whys and wherefores of these too-often-overlooked issues, exploring the relationship between them and the ripple effects associated with doing them well (or not) … effects that can impact your ability to cost-justify your entire initiative. This will be an hour very well spent!

Brought to you by governance experts 

•  Steve Weissman - [email protected] 
•  Jesse Wilkins - [email protected] 
•  Donda Young - [email protected]

and people like you!

© Steve Weissman • All Rights Reserved • www. hollygroup.com • 617-383-4655

When pursuing good governance, time needs to be at least as well budgeted as money. Otherwise, you’ll do a poor job of it – or worse, never get done at all.

© Steve Weissman • All Rights Reserved • www. hollygroup.com • 617-383-4655