Awash in Data

My father worked in corporate America before everyone had a personal computer. Instead, my Dad had a tray on the left side of his desk that acted as his in box and a tray on the right that acted as his out box.

He traveled to Asia on multi week business trips and upon his return, he’d be greeted by a giant stack of memo’s, directives and other inter-office correspondence. His solution was to take the stack of paper from his in box and move it directly to the trash can. “If it’s important, they can call me,” he would say.

Dad’s approach to managing his data (paper) wasn’t glitzy or fancy, but it worked and I think it has some application in the digital world.

I’m pretty sure that if I deleted everything in my email store that was more than 6 months old, I’d probably never miss 99% of it. But I know to my core that 1% of that email data set is vital, and so the whole thing lingers on the mail server. That data is then replicated to Endsight’s off-site back up cloud and so now, this blob of mostly useless data exists in two places.

In his article entitled, “The big data addiction” Matt Prigg shares some of his insight into how this very issue is impacting organizations of all sizes today. In it Prigg says, “In a cruel twist of fate, our dependence on ever-expanding digital data has created a feedback loop that fuels its own growth. Within the past 10 years or so, we’ve grown more productive by using business technology. As a result, we’ve created even more massive mountains of data, and we rely upon those mountains to such a degree that we need to duplicate them – multiplying the problem again.”

In addition to email, Prigg is writing about business system data, file shares and a litany of other administrative and back up data sets. In a large organization, this data grows and duplicates at a much faster rate than in a small organization, but a small business isn’t immune to the problem.

I think that for most small businesses that data can be broken up into two parts, email and shared files. I recently contributed an article to the East Bay Chapter of the Association of Legal Administrators that highlights a few technologies that I think can be used to help manage email data without pressing the “delete” key. http://www.ebala.org/Topic.aspx?wiki_id=87#VendorArticle

For file shares, I think one of the prime culprits for expanding data is the fact that no one is really responsible for the files stored on the file share. For example, Endsight had a file on its sales and marketing drive called “2003 archive.” It hadn’t been opened since 2004. Every time I saw the file I thought to myself, “I should just right click & select delete.” But I didn’t create any of the files and so I couldn’t say for sure that someone wouldn’t go looking for a file housed in the archive.

I think the best solution for this problem is to create and publish a document retention policy. For an example of one click here: http://www.abanet.org/lpm/lpt/articles/sampledocretentionpolicy.pdf . This can help to eliminate any guess work and replace it with simple policy enforcement. You can even use technology to set rules and automate the document retention / purge process.

More and more of Endsight’s outsourced IT clients are encountering data store limit issues. We expect these issues to increase as firms move their on-premise computing systems to cloud computing.

To help our clients address this challenge, Endsight provides Planning Services: CIO/Sr. IT Management level consulting & strategy as part of our fixed fee, outsources IT approach.  If you’d like to talk in-person about your data situation click here to schedule an appointment.