What Counts?

Lee Karas and Maura Dunn close out their ARMA InfoCon 2026 coverage with a full debrief from Savannah, Georgia. AI ran through nearly every session, and so did the questions. How do you control it? What do you do with the prompts? Who decides how it gets used? This episode covers what they learned about records retention and AI, and where the profession goes next. Made for This Moment Many attende...

InfoCon Update: AI and Information Governance What Counts checks in from the convention center at ARMA InfoCon. After a weekend of pre-conference activities and leadership sessions for chapter and regional leaders and the board of directors, the educational sessions and exhibit hall are in full swing. One theme runs through all of it: AI and information governance. The message from day two is clea...

Lee Karas and Maura Dunn take What Counts on location for the first time. They recorded this episode live from ARMA InfoCon 2026 in Savannah, Georgia. In this short check-in, they explain why information governance and AI belong in the same conversation. Back to Our Information Management Roots For both hosts, InfoCon is a return to their information management roots. It is also their first InfoCo...

Data Lifecycle: The Cost of Keeping Everything Forever In Episode 145, a lightning round that takes on the keeping everything forever mentality. Staff lose time every day hunting through duplicate versions. Eventually someone shares the wrong one with a counterparty. A data breach exposes far more than it needed to. In litigation or an audit, everything responsive that you still hold must be searc...

Training vs automation in information governance is a risk decision, not a technology preference. In this lightning round, Lee Karas and Maura Dunn explain why training alone rarely holds. At maturity level one, a program works only when individual people make heroic efforts. However, manual filing breaks down fast, because "I'll file that tomorrow" rarely turns into done. For a small company with...

Why You Need Information Governance Policies Why do you need information governance policies? In this lightning round of What Counts, Lee Karas and Maura Dunn explain how policy turns records into dependable evidence. First, Maura shows how a written policy sets expectations for your team and for everyone who relies on you. Next, they tackle a hard question: is a policy you ignore worse than no po...

Most people hear "information governance risk" and think immediately of a data breach. In this lightning round, Lee Karas and Maura Dunn argue that the breach is only one risk on the list, and often not the one that costs you most. They work through the risk of not being able to reach your own information, using the New England PBS stations whose seventy years of program archives went dark when th...

Records vs Non-Records: What Counts as Evidence Records vs non-records is the first distinction any information governance program has to get right, and most organizations never make it explicitly. In the opening episode of our lightning round series, Lee Karas and Maura Dunn answer both halves of the question: what is a record, and what is not. A record is any data, in any format, that is recorde...

Records findability starts at the point of creation Trustworthy information has four attributes. It must be accurate, reliable, timely, and findable. Last episode covered the first two. This week, Lee Karas and Maura Dunn take on the other two. The rule does not change. Capture the record where the work happens. Capture it when it happens. Capture it from the people doing the work. As a result, ti...

Provenance decides whether your data is AI-ready Everyone wants to point AI at their content repositories. Maura Dunn's position in Episode 139 is simpler than that. A model can only be as trustworthy as the data feeding it. Provenance settles that question long before anyone builds a pipeline. Records capture points settle provenance. These are the moments in a business process where an input bec...

Universal search was designed to bring you the universe. So is your AI assistant. Lee and Maura take on the two questions they left hanging last episode: how do you know which version is the last one, and how do you know your data is reliable? AI-ready data turns out to be the same problem, it is not solved by searching harder, and in 2026 it carries a regulatory clock.

Corporate data capture risk is a critical vulnerability that can completely disrupt an enterprise during sudden regulatory compliance audits or high-stakes litigation holds. Welcome back to What Counts, the podcast that digs into the messy information governance problems organizations inherit, ignore, and discover too late. In this episode, hosts Lee Karas and Maura Dunn move past theoretical conc...

Clean dashboards and reliable data don't happen by accident. In this episode of What Counts, Lee Karas and Maura Dunn pick up from the shift from records management to information governance and move into the three action principles that actually get you there: stop making copies, focus on data creation points, and touch once, use many times. They trace how society lost its mindfulness about creat...

What's the difference between records management and information governance — and why should anyone running a business care? In this episode of What Counts, Lee Karas and Maura Dunn step back from the weeds of counterparty data to answer a deceptively simple question: what is information governance, and why is it the natural next step? Maura traces the journey from a world where creating a record...

Welcome back to "What Count," the podcast where information governance meets contract lifecycle management. In this episode, Lee and Maura explore the critical next step after solving your counterparty data chaos: maintaining control of vendor information across multiple systems and teams. Discover how to build a centralized counterparty database that enables operations teams, procurement, and leg...

Most counterparty data reconciliation projects fail at the same assumption: that one identifier — usually a tax ID — can resolve who you're actually doing business with. In Episode 133 of What Counts, Maura Dunn walks through a real two-year project to reconcile 350,000 counterparty records across eight systems at a company built through acquisition: four contract management platforms, one ERP car...

Episode 132 - Most organizations are being pushed to adopt AI-powered workflows before their data is anywhere close to ready. In this episode of What Counts, Maura and Lee pick up where they left off — diving deep into the concept of data reconciliation and why it must happen before AI ever touches your records. Using a real-world example built across multiple systems — a customer database, a work...

Episode 131 - Data governance and AI readiness go hand in hand — and most organizations aren't as ready as they think. In this episode, Maura and Lee take a hard look at what an AI-powered customer support escalation workflow actually requires to function. Spoiler: it's not just a smart model. It's clean, connected, versioned data — customer records, contract terms, and executed agreement instance...

Episode 130 - When a company acquires another business, it inherits a tangled web of contracts — each with its own payment terms, clauses, and conditions. Contract one says 30 days, contract two says 45, and contract three says you never have to pay. So what happens when you point AI at this mess? In this episode of What Counts, we explore why contract data governance must come before AI deploymen...

In this episode of What Counts, Lee and Maura move beyond diagnosing the tension between growth and governance and dive into what real solutions look like. From the “records police” stereotype to the engineering metaphor of an ungoverned engine ready to blow, they unpack why organizations struggle to balance speed with safety—and how cross‑functional coalitions can change everything. Through stori...

Episode 128 - In this episode of What Counts, Lee and Maura dive into one of the most universal challenges leaders face: balancing the urgency of growth with the discipline of governance. From chasing new markets to managing real‑world information chaos—yes, even inside an information governance firm—they unpack why governance always feels like something you’ll “get to later,” and why “later” is e...

Episode 127 - This episode of What Counts unpacks a problem every organization faces but few diagnose correctly: workflows fail when they don’t reflect the reality of how work actually gets done. Through real‑world examples—from delegated invoice approvals to storage and construction contracts—we explore how policy changes, unclear roles, and poorly analyzed workflows create bottlenecks, late paym...

Episode 126 – Many organizations confidently claim they operate in a mature, well‑managed environment—until someone starts examining how work actually...

Episode 125 - Contract Lifecycle Management touches every corner of an organization—finance, legal, procurement, operations, compliance, and the business itself. But despite the promise of modern CLM platforms, most implementations fail for one simple reason: the organization wasn’t ready for the software. In this episode of What Counts, Lee and Maura revisit a conversation recorded in early 2024,...

Episode 124 - Fact or Fiction. Governance gets a bad rap—too rigid, too bureaucratic, too “records police.” But in reality, good Information Governance is one of the most powerful accelerators a business can have. In this episode, we bust the most persistent myths holding teams back, from the idea that governance stifles innovation to the belief that it’s only for heavily regulated industries. You...