Any lingering doubt information governance is a strategic global issue?

Colleague Bassam Zarkout shared this story from the New York Times with me over the recent holidays: Bush Data Threatens to Overload Archives.  While stories about an unpopular president during his waning days in office can go overlooked, this one raises some important issues regarding information governance that extend beyond the White House, government in general -- to the enterprise.

I did a little reading and came across this one from the very beginning of 2008: White House Has No Comprehensive E-Mail Archive.

While they provide tidy little bookends to the calendar year, the more interesting point they raise is the one we have been focusing on at RSD: that vast expansion in content requiring treatment as "records" will converge with a rising tide of government regulation to create a strategic, global information governance challenge.

The referenced articles focus on two interesting areas: email, the age-old scourge of enterprise records managers, on the one hand, and the almost incalculable number and types of new content that will be deemed records, and therefore will need to be retained, i.e. archived, and properly disposed of over time, on the other.

Because of the events surrounding 9/11, it became necessary to capture and analyze a vastly broader and more voluminous range of data -- and to make that data part of the administration's "record," which must be retained on our National Archives.  No one could argue the need.

But think about this within the enterprise context -- and it is not hard to imagine 50-fold increases in the content we need to archive as well.

It is estimated in the "Bush Data" article above that Bush will leave 50-times the amount of "records" that Clinton left when he wrapped up his presidency

Instant messages; blog posts written as an employee; Facebook contributions; Skype calls; Twitter microblog posts; video (telepresence or YouTube)...

The moral of the story: get started NOW thinking about how you will manage the creation, retention, and final distribution of enterprise content.  You may already be behind!

Tim DEMPSEY, RSD Marketing, tde@rsd.com