Volume to the Sixth Power

Scalability.  Now that’s perhaps one of my all time favorite marketing terms.  All software vendors offer a flexible solution that is open and scalable, right?  According to Wikipedia, scalability is a system which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner or to be readily enlarged. 

When it comes to information governance, exactly how do you define and measure scalability?  Most people in the enterprise content management (ECM) and information management market will tell you it’s the amount of stored data (i.e. number of documents stored or actually storage size).  While this is certainly one valid metric, there is more.  Much more.  It’s something I often refer to as volume⁶.

Volume¹ – Content

So, let’s get the obvious one out of the way.  On a daily basis, companies have employees producing gigabytes and applications generating terabytes of information.  This ends up being stored somewhere –typically in one or more repository.  An easy indicator of measuring scalability is the vendor track record for supporting or managing petabytes or even exabytes of information. 

Volume² – Format Types

There are practically thousands of different types of information within the enterprise – print streams, images, ERP/CRM reports, Office documents, databases, e-mail, Website content, instant messages and rich media such as audio and video files.  Each content type has different formats – each with its own unique needs.  Some repositories are better than others at handing certain formats which is precisely one of the reasons companies have multiple repositories.  Information governance must take into account the variety of formats and repositories in the organization.  More on this next month…

Volume³ – Jurisdictions, Regulations, and Laws

I attended a recent Webcast from D4 Discovery that indicated there are over 14,000 information retention laws.  Exactly how does a global organization follow and manage these regulations?  How about enforcement of these laws?  There are clear indications the number of laws will increase in the next few years.    

Volume⁴ – Platforms and Storage Devices

Life will be beautiful (and way too boring) if there was one platform, operating system and storage technology in the enterprise.  Platforms and operating systems range from Windows, Mac, UNIX, to the mainframe.  Then you have storage solutions and hierarchical storage management (HSM) products such as WORM, IBM TSM, Veritas NBU, EMC Centera, and HP Omniback.  An IT leader from a fortune 100 company once told me, “We have one of each”.   Makes sense.  Your information governance framework must take all of these environments into consideration.

Volume⁵ – Applications

Applications run your business – billing, customer service, accounting/finance, human resources, supply chain management, procurement, IT service management, etc, etc, etc.  Oh yeah, don’t forget your LOB (line of business) applications.  These systems generate and consume an infinite amount of information.  How easy and fast can your ECM system capture content from these isolated systems?  How about providing these various applications secure and fast access to this content?

Volume⁶ – Users

What if (and yes, a big what if) you only have one person accessing your ECM system that’s managing petabytes of information?  Is this still considered scalable?  Some people will claim yes.  However, this is not true.  It’s also about the amount of access and concurrent requests made to the system. 

So, the next time you talk with your information governance vendor – ask them how they define scalability.  I define it as volume to the sixth power: (content)  plus  (formats)  plus (jurisdictions) plus (platforms/storage)  plus (applications)  plus (users).

Now that’s scalability.

Comments

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