Information Lifecycle Management - The Convergence of two “Worlds”?

Last week I was at an IDC Storage Roadshow in Ljubljana in Slovenia. When I first received the invitation I started thinking about what AIIM as an ECM Association could possibly contribute to a conference that focused on the latest storage technologies and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM). We use the same terms, but we mean different things which makes speaking to a crowd op potentially hardware oriented visitors a daunting task.

I was pleasantly surprised. The questions and subjects raised by all speakers showed that even though you may be working for a storage manufacturer or have your main business out of providing hardware services, this does not mean that Content as an object that is part of a business process  is something that you do not care about. Instead, all speakers, although also showing off their latest hardware and storage technologies and using the ILM to mean moving data down a variety of different storage media, also showed awareness of business problems and business drivers.  Moreover, the participants, 95% of which confessed to be IT and hardware interested “got it”. Their questions, although also about access times and cost per MB, GB, TB, and PB, also showed acute awareness of the need to look beyond just the technologies to the strategies behind it.The presentation about Content Management rather than Storage Management went down very well.

In the end I was left with only one regret: I wish I had had more time to talk to some of the many end-users present to see how far along the road to ILM, both the Storage as well as the ECM kind, they had gotten.

There were two comments however that I want to leave you with, both of them on stage: “Just save everything, especially when it comes to email!” and “The days of the clever consultant are gone. Everything is provided in a box these days.”  I disagree completely with both of them, but would be curious to hear your take on these two statements.

By Hanns Köhler-Krüner

Comments

[Nina Nixon]

On emails: There is a danger in going to extremes in saving every irrelevant email. What deems relevancy? My view is that any email that is pertaining to the way we do business, interactions with customers, and employees, such as policies and procedures, business transactions, just to name a few is deemed relevant. Businesses get in trouble when they do not have these emails listed above. But we must be careful here, because even our colleagues send non-business type irrelevant emails. I feel that we need to treat emails like other documents and we put the relevant ones on storage and retention schedules based on your company's legal and proprietary obligations. That's why it is good to have a policy and procedure manual in place, listing email handling in one of the chapters. Secondly, email space is not infinite, and acquiring more space has a cost associated with it that many businesses who save every email regardless of the nature of it have yet to realize.

On consultants: Let's review why consultants are around in the first place: To give a company a specialized view on an area in which the company needs an expert opinion and/or to provide a customized way to reach the client's objectives. If you can purchase this result "out of the box" then you are not realizing your company's full potential or the uniqueness of your company. Also, even already successful companies can benefit greatly from alternate expert views to help increase their revenue and market base, while working within their budget.

[Elliot Smart]

Nina is correct on both counts. The retention of emails that constitute a record within an organisation must comply with the organisations retention schedules rather than simply be stored ad infinitum. This means that they must be managed as records. Failure to do so represents a breach of compliance since it is the corporate policy on records management rather than the records themselves that are signed off. Given that this is the case, it is inherently dangerous to have such a simple management process for emails.

Consultants are a mixed bag and the blame for this must be put to the industry itself. Real consultants can bring experience and a wide perspective to your corporate project and, in doing so can definitely add value, sometimes to a really significant degree. However, the industry refers to anyone with product training as a consultant and, in so doing, attempts to con their clients into paying a high price for typically inexperienced skills. This undermines the whole consulting industry and inevitably leads to dangerous outcomes such as the storage industry saying 'just whack it all into ILM' with no counterbalance from the experts.