How is information governance different from records management and data governance?

These three disciplines overlap and are often confused, but each answers a different question about how an organization handles its information.

Quick definitions

• Records management (RM) governs the records an organization creates and receives — evidence of business activity that must be kept for a defined period to meet legal, operational, and historical needs. Its core concerns are classification, retention, disposition, and authenticity throughout the records lifecycle.
• Data governance governs data — typically structured information in databases and systems. It focuses on data quality, ownership, definitions, lineage, master data, and the rules that keep data accurate, consistent, and usable across an organization.
• Information governance (IG) is the umbrella above both. It is the coordinated framework of policies, accountability, roles, and controls that determines how an organization values, creates, uses, protects, and disposes of all its information — records and non-records, structured and unstructured.

How they relate

Think of IG as the strategy and RM and data governance as two of its operational disciplines.

• Scope. Data governance tends to be narrowest (structured data). RM covers anything that qualifies as a record, in any format. IG covers the entire information ecosystem, including privacy, security, legal holds, FOIA or open-records response, and risk.
• Driver. RM is driven heavily by legal and regulatory retention obligations. Data governance is driven by accuracy and trustworthiness for analytics and operations. IG is driven by balancing the value of information against its cost and risk.
• Authority. RM and data governance usually live with specific functions (records officers, data stewards). IG is cross-functional, bringing legal, compliance, IT, security, privacy, and the business to one table.

Why the distinction matters

When these programs operate in isolation, gaps appear: data that is well-managed but never disposed of, or records retained without privacy controls. IG aligns them under shared principles so retention, protection, access, and disposition decisions are consistent.

For a broader overview of the discipline, see the information governance topic hub.

In short: data governance and records management answer “how do we manage this kind of information well?” Information governance answers “how should the whole organization treat information as an asset and a liability?”