How to Incorporate Legacy Information Clean-up into your Go Forward Strategy for Information Management?

Posted on Aug 17, 2010 in Records Management News

Johannes (Jan) C. Scholtes
Chief Strat­egy Offi­cer and Chair­man ZyLAB
Ams­ter­dam Area, Nether­lands
Bard Mem­ber of AIIM

As the aver­age rate of infor­ma­tion growth in orga­ni­za­tions holds steady at 30–40% per year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore’s_law), this is and will con­tinue to cre­ate huge prob­lems and lia­bil­i­ties that need to be addressed. More and more peo­ple are aware of the prob­lem, but few know how to take action, let alone how to imple­ment pro­ce­dures and poli­cies to bat­tle the ongo­ing infor­ma­tion explosion.

Gov­ern­ments and many orga­ni­za­tions that oper­ate in reg­u­lated indus­tries such as the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, air­plane main­te­nance and finan­cial indus­tries have imple­mented records man­age­ment poli­cies to help achieve com­pli­ance with var­i­ous reg­u­la­tions and gov­er­nance require­ments. Some­times these records man­age­ment ini­tia­tives address all infor­ma­tion that is cre­ated in such an orga­ni­za­tion, but often it only cov­ers a por­tion. This leaves a con­sid­er­able amount of risk on the table. In addi­tion, as Gartner’s Debra Logan stated, in many other orga­ni­za­tions, every­body is respon­si­ble for their own records man­age­ment, which more or less results in the fact that nobody does it.

These orga­ni­za­tions should strongly con­sider the fol­low­ing risks and opportunities:

1. eDis­cov­ery costs and risks will be much higher; accord­ing to Gart­ner, orga­ni­za­tions that do not have con­tent archiv­ing poli­cies in place will have 30% higher eDis­cov­ery costs.
2. Bet­ter Early Case Assess­ment (ECA) is only pos­si­ble if you know what infor­ma­tion sources you have and what is in there. In order to deter­mine which cus­to­di­ans are involved and what really went on, you need orga­nized data col­lec­tions, advanced exploratory search, con­tent ana­lyt­ics and other tools to search and ana­lyze all of your rel­e­vant cor­po­rate data in real-time. The bet­ter you apply infor­ma­tion man­age­ment prin­ci­ples, the eas­ier this is.
3. Should your orga­ni­za­tion plan to sell-off divi­sions, then you should have all your records and files orga­nized by divi­sion or by topic and not only by cus­to­dian / month (as many orga­ni­za­tions do to archive their email). The cost of split­ting such infor­ma­tion will be tremen­dous and it will take a lot of effort and resources from your employ­ees.
4. You will save a con­sid­er­able amount on your stor­age and backup costs if you imple­ment infor­ma­tion and records man­age­ment.
5. Proper Knowl­edge Man­age­ment is only pos­si­ble if you have orga­nized and cleaned up all your infor­ma­tion. You will need to apply Infor­ma­tion Val­u­a­tion prin­ci­ples and remove irrel­e­vant and redun­dant infor­ma­tion. Essen­tial “lessons learned” should be well orga­nized and eas­ily acces­si­ble by using tax­on­omy and other access tools.

Orga­ni­za­tions should quickly turn their atten­tion to proper infor­ma­tion man­age­ment and records man­age­ment poli­cies for this con­tin­u­ally grow­ing pool of new infor­ma­tion. But once those poli­cies are in place, what should one do with all the legacy infor­ma­tion? Gain­ing con­trol over the vast amounts of legacy data you already have should be approached in a sim­i­lar fash­ion as set­ting up your go-forward struc­ture for records and infor­ma­tion management:

Read more here and please let me know what your orga­ni­za­tion has done to clean up legacy information:

http://aiimcommunities.org/erm/blog/how-incorporate-legacy-information-clean-your-go-forward-strategy-information-management

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