Who is responsible for looking after information in an organisation?

There are two distinct camps which hold quite opposite views to each other when answering this question.

While one group defines the responsibility to an individual or group to manage information. Over the years, they have even changed the role of such person and as information management become more complex, a lot of businesses have appointed a CIO (Chief Information Officer) in their board to manage this function while the other companies have put this as additional responsibility to the CFO (Chief Financial Officer) and/or Human Resources Manager.

The other group of believers profess that managing information is everyone’s responsibility within the business and therefore they manage the process through distributed data-sets and databases with ‘need-to-know’ access levels.

Therefore there is no one answer to this eternal question as the process is still evolving. The import thing is, what suites your particular business the most?