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Contributed by Alan Weintraub, senior information management leader and evangelist, DocAuthority
Digital Hoarding Limits Digital Value
In the past five years we’ve seen Information growing faster than users’ abilities to manage it. Unstructured Information makes up 80% of the Information processed by organizations daily. But organizations struggle to properly identify, classify, manage, retain and secure this Information – exposing the organization to undue risk and lost business potential.
The movement to the cloud has forced organizations to face years of digital hoarding. Many organizations have made the decision to shut down their data centers and move information technology to cloud based solutions. Unstructured information today is maintained in many repositories, including email, file shares, Google Drive, Dropbox and SharePoint, to name just a few. Manually reviewing and organizing the vast quantity of information is often a daunting and impossible task. It is critical to any migration that information is identified and separated into groups that require migration from those that can be deleted.
Increased privacy regulations also demand better understanding of your digital information. In addition to protecting the basic human right of privacy for individuals, it has forced businesses to develop better management and controls of their Information — what Information are they storing, where it is stored, what category it falls under, what level of risk it poses to the business and what governance policies need to be applied to fully control the Information.
Understanding the Information will provide the benefit of making Information more meaningful or uncovering the untapped potential of Information to the benefit of both the business and its customers.
Automated tools have emerged that will help end-uses with this time-consuming task by intelligently scanning and grouping their large amount information into common categories that could be used to make go forward decisions on the information. A good example is their ability to differentiate files that contain PII information from those that are related to contracts. Understanding the universe of files and their associated groupings is a critical task when deciding on information that should be kept and information that can be deleted.
Once we have discovered and sorted the digital information into stacks that I call file groupings, we now need to add metadata that will make the information more valuable to the organization. This step in the process involves the organization of the information into document types that align with the organization’s business structure or taxonomy. It is critical that the end-users understand how to access the information. End-users want to work in a familiar environment and should not be forced to think differently when trying to access information.
Finding the information needed to make informed business decision can be very frustrating. Associating information to document types in a predefined taxonomy can simplify the search and access to key information required to strategic business decisions. The maturity of automated tools, e.g. AI and Machine Learning, has led to better capabilities in identifying and assigning document type and associated metadata resulting in higher accuracy and quality of the information that describes the content.
Once the information has been organized into a business-friendly taxonomy and context, an information governance program will be needed to define and enforce security, consistency and retention policies. Information governance ensures that the unstructured data is available, accessible and reliable when needed for analysis. End-users need to be reassured that the right information to make strategic business decisions is available and trustworthy. Too many times the wrong information is used in making decisions or communicating information to interested parties. Applying consistent policies to information provides uses with the assurance that they can the access and trust of the information.
An effective information governance program not only will ensure that you have reliable information but will also ensure that you have the implemented the right policies to keep your information protected and your executives out of jail.
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About the Author
Alan Weintraub is a senior information management leader and evangelist at DocAuthority. As an AIIM Fellow, he is focused on helping organizations maximize the value of their information. A former industry analyst at Forrester and Gartner, Alan is a recognized expert on multiple aspects of enterprise information management (EIM) including information governance (both data and content governance), enterprise content management, data management, digital rights management, and digital asset management. Get in touch with Alan on LinkedIn and Twitter.
