The Perilous Future of Decision Making in Information Management.

• Author: MONTANA, JOHN C.

We live in an increasingly complicated world. The legal environment that constitutes such an important part of our world is also becoming increasingly complex. This is true in our lives in general, and is equally or perhaps more true in our professional lives. New doctrines and ever more complex versions of existing doctrines govern our professional existence in areas as varied as civil rights, environmental issues, and information management. The proliferation of laws, cases, doctrines, and experts sometimes appears to create an impossible and hopelessly confusing situation for an information manager, but this is not the case. This article examines the increasingly complex array of duties surrounding the professional information management environment and some methods for responding to them.

There are a number of issues whose complexity has grown over time, and will continue to grow in the future. Each requires ongoing attention from today's information manager. Survival -- in several senses -- may well depend upon it.

Records and information management as a discipline began life as a relatively straightforward process. A business developed and maintained a basic set of business and operational records -- accounting, personnel, inventory, operating records, and the like. Many of these were not governed by much law, and the rest were governed by straightforward legal provisions setting forth very basic requirements as to content and retention period. All such information was initially captured on paper, and most was maintained in this format for its entire period of retention. Any information not retained on paper was transferred to microfilm or microfiche, again in a straight-forward process with well-understood ground rules.

Over time, this simple process underwent what is -- when viewed in its entirety -- a staggering increase in complexity. The basic set of business records has been transformed into a vastly increased data set including information on environmental monitoring and compliance, civil rights compliance, anti-terrorist regulation, and a host of other information collection requirements that were unheard of a half-century ago. Further, the once-simple media environment has also become vastly complicated, with electronic information now the norm, and huge numbers of data types, data formats, media types, and hardware platforms complicating the picture.

The reasons for this change are varied. Perhaps foremost among the driving forces is a drastic change in the legal environment surrounding commercial information.

Prior to the 1960s, the legal system's attitude toward commercial information was essentially one of laissez faire. While information capture and retention were required for certain basic purposes such as tax collection, those purposes were few. Beginning in the 1960s, however, commercial information collection took on a vastly increased role in society as first the federal government and then state governments began to use it as an instrument of social and governmental policies considerably outside the then-normal scope of the government-business relationship. Consider, for example, employment records. Prior to the 1960s, the only data required to be kept was basic payroll information, to ensure that taxes were paid and that employees were properly compensated.

In the interim, substantial new burdens have arisen, driven by dramatic changes in the social climate of the country. Many employers now find that extensive information must be maintained to comply with requirements under civil rights laws, gender and age discrimination laws, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Family Medical Leave Act, many environmental laws, and other legislation. Similar complexities have arisen in many other areas of commercial information collection.

The changing nature of the legal arena is not the only source of additional information collection impetus. Dramatic advances in information technology have been similarly responsible. For example, air pollution monitoring is performed by automated recording devices that continuously monitor pollution emissions. Although the law requires this monitoring, it is nonetheless only possible to impose such requirements because of technological advances that permit the imposition of such a requirement. Technology, therefore, drives the legal requirements in this case. In a similar manner, we now capture and retain vast amounts of unregulated information primarily because we now have the capacity to do so, and only later do we develop data mining techniques that allow us to utilize it.

Changing Legal Duties

Our legal duties with respect to organizational information in our possession have significantly changed over time as well. For many years, our basic duty was to create and maintain a basic set of records and to produce them for regulators should we be audited. There was no duty to maintain records on behalf of an opponent in a lawsuit, provided only that we did not improperly dispose of the records after commencement of the lawsuit. The precise nature of our record keeping and...