Keeping a watchful eye on your information.

• Author: Lanter, Amy
• Position: IN FOCUS: A Message from the Editor - Editorial

McKinsey Global Institute reports that 15 out of 17 U.S. economic sectors have more data stored per company than the U.S. Library of Congress (LOC)--and that's a massive amount of information. As of September 2011, the LOC had collected 254 terabytes of data--that's about 254,000 gigabytes of 254 million megabytes.

Knowing what all that information is and where it resides is vital to en organization successfully doing business--and especially to responding to e-discovery. It allows an organization to routinely dispose of information that has met its retention requirements, thereby reducing the volume it has to manage, hold for litigation, and produce for discovery.

Taking this one step further, it is vital to ensuring effective information governance and, specifically, to complying with the Generally Accepted Record. keeping Principles[R] (GARP[R]) of Availability, Retention, and Disposition, which, together, state that an organization must maintain information in a way that ensures it can be retrieved quickly and accurately, kept as long as needed to meet legal, regulatory, fiscal, operational, and historical requirements, end disposed of it when it is no longer required to be maintained. Learn more at www.arma.com/garp.

Many organizations create data maps to help them do this. But, in this issue, Wayne Wong explains how creating a data atlas provides a "total information systems overview" that could be an even more valuable tool. Wong de. scribes how to create, implement, and maintain a data atlas, beginning with building a strong collaborative team with RIM, legal, IT, and line-of-business leaders.

The RIM Fundamentals Series kicks off 2012 with spring cleaning advice from Brian Tuemmler. Cleaning up shared drives--which is desperately needed in many organizations--is another key to understanding what information exists and where it lives...