A transparent organization is one that provides all the interested parties with the information on its functioning, decision making, its investments and expenditures, its plans, control measures, etc. Transparency can therefore be exercised in both the public and the private sectors. Nevertheless, transparency is much more related to public sector, as the interested parties are a broad group of people, including directly administered citizens and, in a democracy, voters that revalidate or not the mandates of the different political parties.

Many countries have enacted public sector transparency laws, that normally include the obligation to publish certain information on the state administration and the public servants on its service; what has been called active publication or publicity. In Spain, as in many other places, the legislation has set deadlines for its accomplishment (the maximum is two years, that is 2015), and therefore there are many  Spanish administrations that in the context of the crisis and public spending cuts have to establish the means to fulfill the law. In Latin America transparency laws have been passed longer ago, and it is admirable the amount of information that can be found through the transparency portals.

Nevertheless, in both cases there is the risk that the exercises of transparency generates isolated silos of information that is only managed with the purpose of active publication. Even authorized voices insist that the publication of information that transparency demands us should be only just another purpose of Information Governance , it is not that clear what administrations are considering regarding this subject from a global viewpoint. The term Information Governance (IG) has been popularized over the time having a more or less generalized agreement that it is an ensemble of structures, policies, procedures, processes and controls that are implemented for information management at an organization’s level to meet the legal and operational requisites. Its principles are broadly recognized theoretically but implemented with difficulty in practice. The information contained in the section “Information governance of AIIM’s website is very interesting. The idea that a specific program or project is needed for real implementation doesn’t help either; in reality IG principles should be in all the information management projects. Chris Walker explains very well in this post (http://christianpwalker.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/ig-guerrilla-tactics/).

In the case of the information that is made public to comply with transparency laws this would be some of the key aspects of an overall perspective.

-The information that is published should be generated in the usual work processes of the administrations themselves; this would guarantee us that there are no different or contradictory public versions.

-If we assume the previous as certain, it means that processes where the information is produced or received should be analyzed, validated or modified if necessary, and includes the publication as a current activity of them.  The analysis that is normally done for the management of electronic documents should be broadened in this aspect.

-Having included publication as part of the current processes, IT tools should allow us its automatization, preventing the discretionality of the decisions regarding the publication or not of certain information. This does not mean that there is no definition of the previous steps of approval before publication, but to promote the traceability of these decisions of publication as part of the process of transparency itself.

-In the focusing of Information Governance it is always very important to implement appraisal policies, that allow the conservation of information that is really important and discard what is not. If we apply this principle, we can find cases where already published information is no longer valuable and that therefore must be destroyed. Once again linked to the mechanisms of definition of disposition schedules we will prevent baselessnes in the decision of how much published information must be available.

-Finally, the  highly complete (on my point of view sometimes excessive) conventions used to demand and preserve the authenticity of documents in administrative acts, such as electronic signatures and time seals, should be aligned with the measures prove the authenticity of the information published for transparency.

These observations have no purposes of discrediting or criticizing the already existing actuations of active publishing. On the complete opposite I welcome all the information that has been published; but yes to propose a global vision that allows the rationalization and on the long term the saving up of resources at the same time that the reliability of the information that is published is guaranteed.