Wikibon Blog

Businesses today of all sizes are challenged to keep up with the growth of digital information, data, and content. The growth in digital records, forecast to top 2.5 zetabytes worldwide by 2012, and the increasing percentage of digital records being designated of critical business value places the onus on end-users to rethink information management strategies to create and deploy the most effective policies, processes, and technology solutions for digital content.

The vast percentage of the business records being created and managed today are digital, by all accounts. With the overwhelming growth of digital content – most notably e-mail with attachments, file system content, instant messages, wiki and web content, and images, otherwise referred to as unstructured data – the management of electronic records has become an increasingly critical issue for corporations of all sizes. A few end-user statistics underscore the current-state:

• As much as 50% of unstructured data is stored longer than it needs to be for business, regulatory, or legal purposes, with much of this content being retained indefinitely
• For those firms that keep track of duplicate content, which is difficult if not impossible to do for most, duplication rates for unstructured data run as high as 20:1
• Firms are increasing their storage capacities by 50% or more per year to accommodate the growth and retention of unstructured data
• Unstructured data now accounts for up to 50% of all enterprise electronic records, including database records and transaction files
• 63% of end-users rate the quality of digital records on shared drives to be poor or fair
• 42% rate the quality of email management to be poor or fair

Businesses can point to several trends and management practices that have led to this current state:

• The proliferation of desktop computing and storage, giving the end user the ability to create, copy, and store content with little or no enforceable restrictions
• The advent of email as a fundamental business tool and the basis for business transactions in many organizations
• Lack of end-to-end information management automation across all content types, that if available, would allow the enterprise to intelligently declare, classify, store, secure, retain, discover, and ultimately dispose of content
• Regulatory mandates that incented organizations to “retain all”, or be subject potentially to scrutiny and fines
• Poor management practices with regard to retention and disposition policies, and the ability to control and enforce policies across businesses
• In some cases, the inability to distinguish between digital content required to support the business and business transactions, and courtesy copies, artifacts, or transitory records maintained for operational expediency
• The immaturity of the records management function when it comes to applying information management practices designed for the physical world to the digital environment
• The inability to easily see users, access policies and rights, and digital content in a clear and real time picture such that the enterprise can enforce effective security and privacy requirements.

Over recent years, many organizations have implemented expensive infrastructure to manage unstructured data partly in response to new federal regulations. Most are resigned to the fact that these investments have turned out to be reactive, stopgap measures designed to address a specific problem, such as electronic discovery. For example, most commercially available archive and electronic discovery solutions are not truly unified or end-to-end. And since enterprise business practices and IT requirements vary greatly, no one architectural approach is clearly superior to another. In addition, many existing systems and processes don’t scale well. Performance is too often less than optimal taxing knowledge and legal discovery efforts with additional operational and litigation costs.

For those companies struggling with existing implementations – particularly larger installations of more than 5,000 end users – many new point solutions have come to market to alleviate known bottlenecks in legacy systems’ authentication, auto-declaration, classification, culling, de-duplication, indexing, mailbox management and search shortcomings. At the same time, there is a fair amount of M&A activity with some high profile examples, including purchases of Stellent by Oracle and Interwoven by Autonomy following the examples of IBM with the FileNet acquisition and Documentum by EMC. Clearly these vendors and others, such as Microsoft with major improvements coming for Exchange 2010 and SharePoint, believe that more end-to-end integration of digital content management and archiving solutions along with offering buyers key functions such as enterprise search, indexing and deduplication will improve enterprise control over unstructured data.

However, it remains to be seen how successful these major vendors, along with Symantec and Opentext, will be in terms of delivering ease of implementation, functional integration, scalability and speed-to-discovery they promise as the sector’s history for assimilation and fusing of major components and/or point solutions has been less than stellar. Complicating the picture for users is the plethora of hybrid solutions incorporating cloud computing and the number of outsourced services that offer to manage pieces of your solution or the entire process including technology titans Google and Dell along with an ever increasing number of Microsoft partners. It is generally accepted that this outsourced solutions business still represents roughly 50% or more of the entire market with more service providers entering the market every quarter.

And what will be the impact on enterprise business processes, as the traditional roles of the records management and CIO organization mature to address these formidable information management challenges?

What business processes need to be reengineered, what new policies and practices are needed to ensure the effective use of some of these new, integrated, enabling technologies and, of course, where are the technology gaps?

Join Wikibon members and four information management practitioners as we discuss these issues and the connection between information management and compliance. Learn how practitioners are applying proven business processes and re-engineering others to cope with today’s systems shortcomings and more effectively manage information, improve security, protect privacy and manage risk.

Facilitated by Wikibon with a panel comprised of senior practitioners from the Energy, Finance, Healthcare, and other industries, the Wikibon Peer Incite will discuss:

• Information management – What has worked, what hasn’t, and what’s new in unstructured data management?
• What drives business investments in unstructured data management? Is it security, privacy, compliance, discovery or other operational risks?
• How have compliance requirements changed the role of the CIO/CTO/Information Management professionals?
• Why organizations need to refocus on business processes before broadly applying information management technology as a business enabler.

Register with Wikibon to gain access to this Free Peer Incite on July 28th & other valuable complimentary research.