This blog post previously appeared on the “Information Nation” blog of Kahn Consulting, Inc.
“Right-sizing Your Information Footprint” is my made-up term for turning your information parking lots into a Goldilocks-and-the-three-bears amount of information: not too much, not too little; just the right amount. There is too much digital content, with more being created continually. We need to clean up the past in a defensible way. While the “daisies” are beautiful at the beginning of their life, they lose their appeal as they decay. The same is generally true for information. Businesses also need a better path forward so that content comes into being because the business needs it, and all records are better managed.
Too much stuff, you fail to be business-efficient and you get your clock cleaned when litigation strikes.
Too little information, you can’t run your business, and you fail to comply with recordkeeping requirements, among other things.
So here are twelve remarkably compelling reasons to right-size, right now:
- Information is growing at such a rapid rate that costs related to storing, finding, using, migrating, extracting, and preserving information are becoming prohibitively high.
- Knowing what information exists and where it is parked to be able to efficiently run your business is becoming too complex.
- Technology has failed to find a good way to manage content in a way that minimizes impact to employee productivity (but Kahn is working on auto-classification to help).
- Employees get too much content to be able to properly manage it.
- Content has sat for years in old “information parking lots” and it is a decaying asset. (Working on a new book, called Chucking Daisies, to help companies deal with precisely this issue.)
- Companies spend too much time looking through way too much irrelevant stuff to respond to litigation, audits, and investigations.
- Companies have out-of-date records used against them in litigation, records which could have been disposed previously.
- Systems are breaking down or no longer work as efficiently as they should, as a result of the information volume burden.
- Data parking lots are being ill-managed, and that failure is causing other failures, not the least of which is failing to harness needed information to be “faster, better, and cheaper”.
- Going Green. No list is complete until it has a bit of “green”. Technology is consuming all kinds of energy. By cutting your energy, emissions, and every other relevant footprint, you are greener, you look better to the outside world, and maybe the marketers have something “green” to say about the effort.
- Information finds itself on unsanctioned data parking lots when sanctioned ones fill up, making life more challenging.
- Along with volume, growth has been the creator of many new information parking lots (smart phones, the cloud, Twitter, blogs, etc.), which makes management of content that much more challenging.
Rightsizing will never be as easy as it is right now, as information parking lots continue to grow and grow. Clean your house of digital data junk. Develop a thoughtful plan for future information retention. Right-size now, because it’s good business.
Guest blogger Randy Kahn is a consultant, lawyer, author, teacher, and speaker, and the founder and principal of Kahn Consulting, Inc.