Cleaning up your information wasteland.

• Author: Corrigan, Michael
• Position: BUSINESS MATTERS

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A new strategic approach to records and information management called information asset management, as practiced in the U.S. Air Force, automates desktop records management decision making to minimize or eliminate the role of the desktop user. This approach, which solves the issues of e-mail records management and e-discovery, could be applied to other large-scale enterprises.

A very large enterprise, the U.S. Force (AF), realized several years ago that it had more than four petabytes of data saved on storage technology devices. Commissioning a study of the stored data that was conducted using industry standards and estimates, the AF learned that probably less than one-third of the data had been accessed in the previous six months.

In addition, the study estimated that the AF may have as much as 50% duplication in stored files across the enterprise--the result of a proliferation of Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and other artifacts that were e-mailed to wide audiences, often as part of coordinating and synchronizing business processes.

In many cases, the owners of the data were no longer able to identify what it represented or justify why they had kept it for so long. The AF costs for operating and maintaining the storage technology to handle this volume of information were several hundred million dollars annually and growing. The conclusion drawn from the study was that the AF was creating giant "information landfills" that were expensive and wasteful.

Reflecting upon this phenomenon, the AF realized that the enterprise was failing to manage information to the end of its life cycle. In a typical case, a project's information and lessons learned would be harvested, then managers would store the project data without deciding its final fate and move on to the next project. To some degree, this practice amounted to institutional abandonment of information management responsibilities, and it wasted scarce financial resources.

Although the AF had an enterprise records management program, this uncontrolled storage practice had been occurring independent of its scrutiny for decades--a widespread phenomenon in many large enterprises. Had records program personnel been asked, they would have determined whether this stored data constituted enterprise records, and the appropriate retention and disposition discipline would have been imposed. If the data had risen to the level of an official record, it would have been retained; if not, it would have been destroyed.

Information Asset Management

The experience of scrutinizing enterprise use of data storage technology was one trigger that led to AF Policy Directive 33-3, Information Management (AFPD 33-3), in March 2006 (www.e-publishing.af.mil/shared/ media/epubs/AFPD33.3.pdf).

The directive states that the AF manages all information as assets that must be available to authorized personnel and applies the same management principles to all information assets regardless of source, owner, security classification, media, location, or other defining characteristics.

According to the AFPD 33-3, "Conceptually, viewing information as an 'asset to be managed' incorporates and aligns into one discipline the multiple disciplines traditionally associated with IM [information management] (data management, records management (RM), multimedia management (MM), documents management, workflow management, and publications/ forms management)."

Any piece of information within the enterprise--document, e-mail, database, and so forth--is now treated as an information asset (IA). AFPD 33-3 embodies the AF information management strategy for enterprise-wide implementation of information asset management (IAM).

IAM treats all information (e.g., data, documents, e-mails, records, spreadsheets, digital images, multimedia, databases) as IAs to be managed equally under the same general principles:

1. Information is an asset so long as it has positive value to the enterprise. When information ceases to have positive...