What is informational obesity and how to deal with it

From the translator . Being engaged in the creation and implementation of an electronic archive system , we have repeatedly encountered situations where organizations enter documents into the system indiscriminately, without paying due attention to the expertise of their value. This has already been written . In the discussions of our previous publications on this issue, the majority of participants defended the following opinion: you can save all the incoming information, it can be useful at any time. How justified is such an approach across a large organization. What is cheaper and more efficient: to keep everything that is possible to keep - or to manage information wisely, in a timely manner deleting all unnecessary? We found an interesting article on this topic in the blog of George Parapadakis , an ECM specialist from IBM. We are offering its translation to the attention of our readers.



Obesity is a disease in which the accumulation of fat in the human body leads to a general deterioration of health.

Informational obesity is a situation in an organization where excessive accumulation of information has a negative impact on the effectiveness of its work, leading to a significant reduction in the budget, slowing down the reaction to changes and problems with the law.
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Before I begin, I want to apologize to people who are obese. I am not going to laugh at them and understand perfectly well how they are suffering. One of my friends died of a heart attack, which was also caused by obesity.

Recently, discussing with my colleague the problems of managing the life cycle of information, I said that some organizations suffer from informational obesity. It was nothing more than an improvised remark, but it fit the description of the situation we were discussing very well. The more I think about this problem, the more I understand the accuracy and meaningfulness of my wording.

Obesity is not a congenital disease, but an acquired disease. More precisely, acquired. Acquired not instantly, but throughout life. If you do not start treatment in a timely manner, the disease develops according to the following scheme: weight gain - the emergence of overweight - the deterioration of the body - death. Many people, however, too late pay attention to the problem of overweight. They in every way deny the problem, justify themselves, chuckle ... They are thinking, as a rule, already when it is too late to do something.

Organizations produce and consume information at a tremendous rate. According to the forecast presented in the study of the consulting company IDC , from 2010 to 2020 the growth of information should increase 50 times! If at such a rate body weight increased, then in 10 years it would increase to three and a half tons. From the experience of working with our clients, we know that in their organizations the total amount of information increases by an average of 35-40% per year.

Yes, we all love to save information in electronic form and can not get enough!

We create new files, huge presentations, intensively e-mail (we each have several mailboxes). We communicate with customers through a wide variety of communication channels, create accounts and groups in social networks, and actively use various mobile devices. We write on the forums, blogs, twitter. We analyze the available variable data and create new ones. If we have little of our own information, we are happy to analyze the information of competitors. Electric meters, GPS-navigators, mobile phones - all these devices collect and analyze data. And we have home computers, laptops, tablets. For a small vacation, we can easily click off a few hundred, if not thousands, of digital photos. And over the past 5 years we have all witnessed an explosive growth in the amount of information.

Developing medical analogies, we note: we have an increased appetite for information. We accumulate excess information just as a patient with obesity is gaining excess weight. Often we save information without thinking about why we will need it. In the case of informational obesity, we can not lose weight: how will we get rid of the information, if we do not know where it came from and why it is needed? If we suddenly talk about unnecessary information, we always have better things to do. When information accumulates too much, we say something like: “Storage is cheap. We will purchase new storage equipment! ”And this look is very, very common. Another recent study shows truly shocking results: 78% (!) Of respondents say that it is enough to purchase another server - and the problem of data growth will be solved.

And now, attention, sensation: storage is not so cheap! If you create a reliable storage, place it in the data center, pay for electricity and air conditioning, it will not be so cheap for you. Yes, storage costs will decrease by 20% every year, but the amount of your information will also grow by 40% every year. You will spend for storage not less, than earlier - simple arithmetics!

Many organizations deny that they have ever encountered such a problem. To the question: “How much information do you currently have stored and what are its annual growth rates?” They usually respond like this: “We don’t know, we never even considered.” Interestingly, how do they then acquire new storage capacity?

Fortunately, many large organizations (banks, pharmaceutical and energy companies, etc.) are already beginning to understand what's what. The annual growth of information is 40%, and the acquisition and maintenance of a storage of 20 petabytes cost a lot of money. In the current economic situation, when IT budgets are cut, it is unlikely that it will be easy for you to entrust the CFO to allocate the necessary funds. Such organizations can now diagnose informational obesity. With the current rate of growth of information in a few years it will be possible to talk about informational obesity of a high degree. \

Informational obesity has a number of side effects. Even if you were able to solve a financial issue, your organization will still be at serious risk.

First, the extra information is a serious threat to the business . Due to the large abundance of unused and unnecessary information, the flow of information flows within the organization slows down. Based on outdated, outdated information, you can make the wrong decision. The accumulation of information will not allow optimizing business processes, improving marketing, improving the quality of services, and debugging communications with customers. In addition, the storage of excess information takes the amount that could be found more useful application.

Secondly, an excess of information creates a number of legal problems . All information of the organization in electronic form can be used in legal proceedings. The legal department of the organization must keep records of all legally relevant information. If there is too much information, then the only solution in such a situation would be to preserve all the information, control access to it and take certain protection measures. It is inefficient, besides takes a lot of time and money. If you suddenly need to submit the necessary evidentiary information to the court, you will have to spend a lot of time before you find what you really need.

Thirdly, redundant information creates problems with ensuring compliance with standards and (compliance ) standards . Various regulatory documents assume that all materials with the status of records must be kept for a strictly limited period of time. There are also requirements for how to dispose of documents after expiration. Records management specialists in their work have to take into account the huge number of requirements emanating from different instances and sometimes involving hundreds of thousands and millions of records. If an organization has too much unsystematic content, then it can hardly be classified, storage schedules developed, and so on. Conducting compliance audits becomes an extremely difficult task, consuming a lot of time. In addition, the inconsistency of internal and industry standards for the organization is also fraught with financial and reputational losses.

You can not, and do not want to stop the rapid growth of data.

All the characteristic trends of today - personalized customer interaction, social media, online learning and multimedia marketing - suggest a rapid increase in the amount of information. Your organization will be less competitive if it does not skillfully take advantage of all these progressive innovations.

So, to reduce the amount of information consumed will not work. How, then, to deal with informational obesity?

Here we can distinguish two approaches. The first of these is symptomatic therapy. Continuing medical analogies, this approach can be viewed as a kind of liposuction:

• Deduplication will , of course, help identify multiple copies of the same document. It is effective if you can apply it to all document repositories (ECM-system, records management, personal computer hard drives, mail servers, etc.). In practice, the situation looks different: deduplication usually affects two or three sources and is applied to files, but not to structured data.
• Archiving and structured storage . A competent approach to the choice of storage of archived data can significantly reduce costs. It is not necessary to keep everything on expensive "hardware". Most of the data of the organization can be stored on inexpensive equipment. And it is not so important that the recovery of this data will not happen instantly, but will take several hours or even days. But how to determine exactly where you need to store this or that information? Most organizations use expensive and reliable storage for critical information systems, regardless of the importance and relevance of the data stored in them. In this case, the idea of ​​structured storage is hardly applicable to network drives on which a huge number of organization files are stored.
• Compression. All storage systems typically use sophisticated algorithms to reduce disk space, compressing stored data and decompressing them when retrieving. They are usually very expensive and demanding of hardware resources: otherwise it is impossible to provide an acceptable speed of work.
  
  All these procedures, of course, give a certain effect, but very little. Of course, they can lead to a certain reduction in costs, but they cannot reduce the growth rate of information.
  
  With the help of these procedures it is impossible to solve legal problems arising from obesity. Managing the storage of information manually and at the same time ensuring compliance with all legal, industry and domestic regulations is extremely difficult.
  
  The second approach is not aimed at eliminating the symptoms, but at treating the disease as such.
  
  To cure informational obesity, we must consider the processes of informational metabolism in an organization, namely: how information is consumed, how it is digested (that is, what valuable meaning is extracted from this information), how information waste is disposed of.
  
  The key question that needs to be answered is: “How much information you really need to keep?” From our conversations with our clients, we came up with the following conclusion: outdated information that has lost its significance is 70% of all information stored in organizations! (Of course, in different organizations the figure may vary, but the ratio of 70% / 30% is what is called the average temperature in the hospital).
  
  The problem, however, is that no one in an organization can isolate these 70% of unnecessary and outdated information. The criteria for obsolescence and uselessness can sometimes be very difficult to formulate.
  
  To solve this problem, a more radical and more realistic approach is required.
  
  Treatment of informational obesity should be based on the following principle:
  
  If and only if the organization can allocate 30% of all available information that really needs to be stored, the remaining 70% can be deleted.
  
  If you take proper measures to maintain this level of information metabolism, then it will be possible to release huge resources and send them in a different direction.
  
  We need such a policy for managing the life cycle of information that would allow us to track compliance with all storage schedules, regulate information metabolism and ensure timely disposal of information garbage. In most organizations, such work is not conducted at all.
  
  Everything seemed simple. But how to develop a policy that would reveal the 30% of the information that needs to be stored?
  
  Studies show that there are three reasons why organizations need to store information for a certain period of time:
  
  
  • regulatory obligations (their performance is monitored by record management specialists)
  • legal obligations (their execution is controlled by the legal department)
  • business significance (a business significance check is carried out by each division of the organization)
  
  
  Thus, the above three units are responsible for the speed of information metabolism. But at the same time, all these units are practically not in contact with each other, they speak different languages, they do not have common policies and control procedures on the basis of which they can build communication with IT.
  
  Lawyers evaluate the information on the subject of legal significance. Records management specialists develop taxonomies, define terms and storage schedules. And other divisions have more important matters, and they have no particular desire to monitor compliance with deadlines or compliance with legislation. But they really need to ensure that important information is always available, that decisions can be made on its basis, and that it can be helpful in working with clients.
  
  And who is responsible for protecting and deleting digital information? IT department, whose activity is in no way connected with the activities of all the above-named departments.
  
  Information life cycle management should be based on a unified policy. There is a common repository in which records management specialists save and delete documents in accordance with accepted schedules. Lawyers adjust storage schedules based on considerations of the legal significance of the documents. Representatives of the remaining divisions use the information stored in the repository and create a new one. And all while interacting with the IT department.
  
  Once the general principles governing information metabolism have been developed, it is necessary to apply them to all mechanisms that exercise physical management of information. Applying a single policy to all repositories, records management systems, etc. allows you to track the growth of data and purge organizational resources from unnecessary information in a timely manner.
  
  

  Conclusion

  
  
  Quickly cure informational obesity is hardly possible. Recovery is possible only in the case of a radical change in lifestyle. Everything is completely solved and achievable. Organizations need to develop an information management model that allows them to establish links between different departments of the organization. Business units evaluate the importance of information and describe it in a language understandable to IT professionals. Lawyers know what information exists in an organization, what divisions it is created for, what it is used for, tracking its legal and evidentiary significance on the basis of this knowledge. Employees of the quality department together with records management specialists develop unified storage schedules. When all these policies are applied to all data sources available in the organization, it will be possible to clearly separate the information that really needs to be stored from that which can be left without pity.