Poor retention policies and unabated data duplication has created a mountain of risk and cost-ridden data - a great opportunity for GRS (getting rid of stuff). Desktop drives, network file systems, pst files, Sharepoint folders, and other end-user oriented storage locations are all good places to start (for other tips, see Information Management Professional Alerts).
A Change in Thinking
At the same time, end-users should get rid of the notion that a single vendor solution can satisfy all unstructured data management requirements across the enterprise. Business needs to accept the idea that different departments (in the same company) are at different levels of maturity that require different investment levels for policy, process, and automation improvement.
Enterprise Architecture of Information Management
Business managers should look at solutions from a business architecture perspective; identity a complete set of requirements; “gap” these requirements against your current environment, and look for needed solutions that support open standards to help guard against high integration costs. Also, plan to phase-in functionality given that business units will be at different maturity levels relative to automation and records management. Establish basic requirements that all can meet (e.g., a corporate folder structure) and scale up from that (e.g., to a full document management system and then ultimately an information management system).
By following this evolution, organizations will be able identify needed functionality, automate those processes that are largely manual today (information classification and policy enforcement) and defensibly delete data that should not be hanging around.
Action Item: Organizations should initiate an information management GRS strategy across the enterprise. Key to this strategy is developing retention policies and automating data classification at the point of creation and use. This will allow organizations to take a full life cycle approach to information management and defensibly get rid of data that does not need to be retained.
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