Challenges: Our Expanding Digital Universe

It is expected that by 2011, our digital world or universe, will have expanded to 10 times the size it was in 2005. This is due to many factors that include the increasing use of email.  Think about the impact this is having in your business. How many emails do you typically get in one day and how many do you send? We have found that the typical worker deals with approximately 150 emails daily on average. As such we need to sort through them and identify the relevant information for our business, discarding those items that are not. This scenario is becoming the norm in many businesses and is just one more reason why we need to gain control and manage this information as well as our official records.

What this is telling us is that we should carefully craft, implement and enforce our policies and procedures in relation to records management yet all too often what we have are digital landfills where all of our information and records are stored on shared drives in shared folders without structure and little security. Add email to this picture and the rate of growth and the challenge grows exponentially. Just think about how and where email is being managed today and the effort you would require to find it. Add to this the need and complexity of applying metadata properly so that this business critical information can be found.

We know information comes in all forms and all types. We know there is a driving need to manage this information properly in order to comply with regulatory guidelines our industry and government put in place but also to meet the demand to produce this information in times of civil litigation. To accomplish this, we know that we need proper policies in place, people trained and technology to support it all. What we sometimes do not know, is how to start or what path is best to take in our journey of managing information properly.

The good news is that you have an association like AIIM that understands these challenges and has created a series of educational programs that specifically address these topics at several levels. This can be found at www.aiim.org/training and is available to you round the clock all year long.

What challenges are you facing today and how are you approaching them? I would like to hear from you.

 

Bob Larrivee - AIIM

Comments

[Stacy Steele]

I completely agree! The need to manage stored data is becoming a very daunting task. Our customers have found that most of the information they have trouble sorting through is unstructured. Customers are constantly concerned that this unstructured data might contain confidential information. To solve this problem our product focuses on first discovering what files you have, second classifying them to meet compliance, and lastly managing them. I am glad that organizations like AIIM are providing the training and tools necessary to help people understand the necessity of managing their ever-growing data. I look forward to reading more!

[newport driving school]

Your analogies are messed up on many levels. For one, IDC explicitly said "digital information". Also, paper - not shelf space - is the storage media for words written on paper.I know there is a driving need to manage this information properly in order to comply with regulatory guidelines our industry and government put in place.It would be very important to my work to have your testimony…
Nice try though.

[Learners Permit]

I can see that you put a lot of hard work on your blog, I’m sure I’d visit here more often.Great job, keep posting interesting articles here. All The Best

[Harry]

Great blog buddy. Nice to know about AIIM