Many an email archive system in production today has been justified by the looming and pressing mandates of a law suit. The justification comes from the legal department based on cost reduction in the discovery process and reduction in expected loss from the law suit. The archiving and IT community know that the implementation is a kluge and of no use to any other department, but that will be fixed "later".
There is a compelling argument that "later" should be much sooner. The ongoing cost of keeping the (say) email archive in pace grows each year as the number and size of emails grow. That data cannot be used by other departments to (say) track customer satisfaction.
Perhaps most important of all, there an emerging breed of big data approaches using very different tools and databases that are unlocking the value in data from all sources, including archived data.
Action Item: The archiving teams and senior management should fight to avoid archived data silos, especially those justified only by fear and compliance. Previous data silos should be eliminated as soon as possible and subsumed into general archives that meet the need of the organization as a whole within a specific industry. Justification should be based on value creation, and the ability to work with big data tools such as Hadoop.
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