I have a system for keeping stuff in my house. When not actively in use, most of my stuff ends up piled on the floor in my home office. When that fills up I move it to more permanent storage in my basement. When that fills up? At this point the attic or the garage become the final resting place of everything I may need someday that I need to keep…just in case.

Am I the only one who has a basket for cables, adapters and power supplies? I keep putting things in but rarely take anything out. And when I do, my process is to dump everything out on the floor, find what I need, then put it all back. Last time I did this I swear I saw a power cord for a Motorola StarTAC. Did I throw it out? No. I wasn’t quite sure, so I left it alone. Please tell me it’s not just me.

Eventually I run out of space to put stuff. At this point, there comes “the purge.” After a great deal of blood, sweat and (sometimes) tears I end up with a curb full of garbage bags. Did I need to keep the stuff in the first place? Sure, some of it.  The point is some of the stuff I store, I retrieve and use. The rest of it “expires.”

Circle of Life

Companies are no different. For companies, “stuff” is information — files, email, databases, images — which make up a wide variety of digital content.

Like any living entity, information has a lifecycle: it’s born, it has a useful life and it dies.

For information, death means no longer being relevant or useful. Companies are great at creating information and pretty good at protecting it while it’s relevant. The problem usually comes with knowing when it’s no longer relevant and to let it go.

No More Business As Usual

For more than half a century information management methodology has focused on making sure we can “get the data back” while ignoring the question of “do we really need it anymore?” There are acres of warehouses filled with magnetic tapes protecting a company’s valuable information assets. How much of those “assets” should really be in a garbage bag on the curb?

There is a growing sense of urgency in corporate circles to attempt to reign in the pervasive data sprawl that has come about as a result of cheap real estate a.k.a. disk space. As data center costs increase with no limit in site for the amount of data being generated, IT departments are asking corporate management to buy into retention strategies. Whether it’s email, collaboration suites, or data warehouses, there is more and more urgency being assigned to the need for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).

We have pushed out a significant amount of data management to the masses. Everyone in our organizations has the ability to create data, not just in “systems of record”, but on file systems, desktops, laptops and mobile devices. The problem? Most people are not skilled to manage data life-cycle. This leads to what I like to call data sprawl. The result is IT departments have the herculean task to manage and protect this data. We see unlimited backups of questionably valuable information.

So let’s start with a basic question: what data do I have?