Are We Treating Contracts Like Information Assets?

Most organizations have contract management and information governance operating in separate worlds. Here's why that matters, and what we're doing about it.

Why Contract Records Are a Hidden Information Governance Risk

At AIIM, we spend a lot of time thinking about where information management breaks down in organizations. And one of the places it breaks down most quietly, without anyone noticing until something goes wrong, is contracts. This is a topic we've been thinking about a lot lately, partly because AIIM is partnering with the National Contract Management Association (NCMA) on a free webinar on May 14 designed to bring these two disciplines into the same conversation. 

Contracts are not just legal documents. They contain obligations, rights, deadlines, relationships, and institutional knowledge that organizations depend on to operate. Effective contract management depends on something very specific: contract records that are accurate, accessible, and retained for as long as they're needed. That sounds basic, but in most organizations it's harder to deliver than it should be, and the consequences of getting it wrong tend to be invisible right up until they aren't.

How Good Information Governance Saved a Multi-Year Contract Project

I know this from experience, not just as an IM professional, but as someone who has lived on both sides of it.

Earlier in my career, I was part of a complex, multi-year project that crossed several departments and involved a significant contract. The thing that saved us was version control and centralized storage. Everyone on the project, regardless of what department they sat in, knew exactly where to find the original agreements and addendums. When questions came up, we had answers, and when scope changed, we had documentation to back up every decision. It sounds like table stakes, but in practice most organizations don't have it.

I've also experienced what happens when governance isn't there. I've been in a situation where poor information governance around a contract resulted in paying a vendor before the work was completed, because nobody could quickly establish what had actually been agreed to and when. I've also been through an eDiscovery process related to contracted work where hours of employee time went toward hunting down meeting notes, contract versions, and communications that should have been easy to find. That kind of scramble is expensive, stressful, and entirely avoidable with the right governance in place.

There are real consequences when information governance and contract management operate in siloes. 

Why Contract Management and Information Governance Must Work Together

Information governance provides the policy and controls that make contract records accurate, accessible, and retained appropriately. Those frameworks determine how records are classified, how long they're kept, who can access them, and what happens when they're no longer needed. Strong governance around contracts directly improves compliance, audit readiness, third-party oversight, and the ability to actually enforce contractual obligations. It's the difference between an organization that can demonstrate what it agreed to and when, and one that finds itself scrambling to reconstruct the record after the fact.

So why don't these two groups work together more? Some of it is structural, since they sit in different departments with different reporting lines and different professional communities. Some of it is vocabulary, because contract management and information governance have overlapping concerns but different ways of describing them. And a lot of it comes down to the fact that neither group has had a clear reason to seek the other out (at least not until something goes wrong).

Why Professional Associations Need to Model Cross-Discipline Collaboration

If we want contract managers and information managers to collaborate better inside their organizations, it helps when their professional associations model what that looks like. Associations exist to serve their members, and sometimes the most valuable thing we can do is build bridges to the communities our members need to work with but don't always know how to reach. Solving real problems, whether they're large and systemic or the everyday friction of two teams that don't speak the same language, takes genuine partnership. I believe that, and I think NCMA does too. This webinar is a small but meaningful example of what becomes possible when associations decide to work together instead of staying in their own lanes.

What Contract Managers and IG Professionals Should Be Asking Each Other

On May 14, AIIM and NCMA are bringing together two experienced practitioners for an honest conversation about where these disciplines intersect and where they consistently fall short of working together. Susan Gleason, Head of Information Governance at Withers Bergman and AIIM Board member, and Michelle Currier, Chief Learning Officer at NCMA, will share their real-world perspectives and take questions from attendees in a small-group Q&A format.

Some of the questions I'm hoping we get into:

1. What does a contract manager actually need from information governance, and are those needs being met in most organizations?

2. Where are the governance gaps most likely to appear across the contract lifecycle?

3. How do you build a retention framework for contracts when legal and operational hold requirements vary significantly by contract type? 

4. And practically speaking, how do contract management and IG teams begin building a working relationship when they've never really had one?

Come with your own questions and your own stories, because the best outcome here isn't a framework or a checklist. It's professionals from both disciplines actually talking to each other and working through what it would take to do this better.

Free Webinar: Contract Management and Information Governance, May 14

The webinar is free, runs one hour, and offers 1.0 CPE/CLP credit and 1.0 CIP credits. It takes place May 14, 2026 from 12:00-1:00 PM ET, and registration is through NCMA's website. Register here.

If you work in records management, information governance, legal, compliance, procurement, or contract and document management, I hope you'll join us. Contracts are too important, and too vulnerable, to keep governing in silos.