The latest trends in information governance

The latest trends in information governance (IG), fueled by the pandemic, show the rise of digital signing and cleaner digitization processes.

The electronic signature seems ubiquitous nowadays; however, many companies still haven’t adopted it by default. The PDF specification includes various digital signatures to fit all contexts and can be easily included in collaborative workflows.

Cleaner digitization processes come with the reduction of the size of archives. Here, the PDF (ISO 32000) and PDF/A (ISO 19005) standards allow many compression techniques adapted depending on the document type.

Of course, the new trends shouldn’t overshadow laws and regulations worldwide, pushing companies’ agendas regarding data governance. We’re taking two examples here: electronic invoicing and privacy laws.

Various countries are slowly making the use of electronic invoicing mandatory. In France, for instance, we’ve already started the process, and progressively all companies will need to receive and generate electronic invoices by 2026. ZUGFeRD and Factur-X are two standards for electronic invoicing that use PDF and PDF/A.

Since the beginning of 2022, every day comes with its GDPR alert. As a result, privacy policies are getting tighter by the hour, and there is a crucial need to manage employees and customer data in a compliant way. Once again, the PDF specification can help with tools such as redaction to remove personal and sensitive data.

Finally, a reliable and compliant archiving plan is one of the most critical aspect of information governance, and PDF/A is the ideal format for the long-term archiving of electronic documents.

The next challenges of information governance are universal accessibility and data processing. Both can be made easier with tagged PDFs.

At ORPALIS, we provide collaborative and compliant solutions to manage the entire document lifecycle, from acquisition to archiving. Our developer tools, GdPicture.NET and DocuVieware, help companies and organizations from all industries, worldwide, to tackle these challenges.