By all accounts, unstructured data, which includes email and other message forms, documents and objects, images and Web content, is growing at truly exponential rates. The need to share, store, and manage all of this electronic data is creating major challenges for users and vendors that are trying to keep up with this overwhelming growth. Poorly architected solutions that once satisfied basic requirements laid out decades ago are beginning to buckle under the increased pressure for interoperability, scalability, end-to-end security, and discoverability. This predicament has exposed the potential for tremendous liabilities across most information-driven enterprises and unsustainable solutions along with upward spiraling integration costs.
Unmanaged information is a growing source of liability to the enterprise. Audits and studies within most organizations clearly demonstrate to executive leadership that millions of electronic records are not being managed, exposing those organizations to unnecessary risk, liabilities, and costs.
Why? How did we get here?
Here's why:
- Too many Enterprise Information Management (EIM) implementations and related vendor technologies have failed to understand a complete set of end-user requirements. The vast majority of the Wikibon user community, representing a good portion of the Global 2000 and hundreds of prominent SMBs, believe EIM vendors focus too much on driving their own product agenda and don’t think strategically enough about user requirements.
- The lack of proper planning, policies, and procedures are contributing factors, resulting in solutions the fail to recognize the entire life cycle of information.
- Outdated and competing regulations, technology restrictions, ineffective policies, and the race to “plug the gaps” with immature technical solutions (e.g., e-discovery, standalone policy management in every part of the infrastructure), has created an environment where the industry spends disproportionately on processes and technologies that return little and in most cases simultaneously weaken internal controls.
New regulatory and security pressures around the corner and the emergence of virtualized infrastructure and cloud services create the urgency for the CIO, CTO, and information management and technology risk experts to engage the information technology community to lay the ground work for next generation of information management solutions.
Action Item: Information executives should seek to gather requirements for the next generation of solutions for information management from the decision makers most affected by the unabated growth of unstructured data including those from compliance, finance, legal, technology, and records functions. Customer needs, technology drivers, and other discussions and deliverables will assist solutions providers with positioning, technology adoption roadmaps, improved customer service and increased sales. to baseline and prioritize real needs and related technology requirements.
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