RIM's role in harnessing the power of big data.

• Author: Dale, Kevin L.

Organizations can maximize the returns on their big data strategies by giving records and information management (RIM) professionals a seat at the table. Applying RIM principles across the enterprise will help organizations improve the quality of their data and access to it, making big data analysis cheaper, quicker, more efficient, and more accurate.

Organizations are struggling to extract value from their exploding, exponential information growth. Many are turning to big data analytics to mine the gold from the data they store. But are they really positioned to mine for gold using a systematic and controlled approach, or are they simply punching holes in the ground and hoping to strike oil? If they strike gold, are they doing their due diligence to ensure sustainable results?

Too often, RIM is the missing ingredient in this big data conversation.

Technology Is Not Enough

While data analytics software can perform complex algorithms that help predict outcomes from enormous data sets, these tools alone cannot determine if the data being evaluated is of sufficient quality to provide the most accurate results. Organizations often must first make significant investments in preparing the data for analysis, scrubbing or normalizing the data set for missing or bad values.

In fact, Thomas Davenport, a well known information management and analytics expert, wrote in the CIO Journal article "Taming the 'Data Plumbing' Problem," "It is often so difficult to extract, clean, and integrate data that data scientists can spend 90% of their jobs doing those tasks."

The organization has to pay data scientists or analysts a tremendous amount just to determine the structure of columns and rows within poorly defined structured data tables in order to apply the variables to the statistical software. And they may also need to do several costly iterations of mining unstructured data just to identify key repetitive text that can be evaluated for its relevance because the data often lacks sufficient context that comes with good metadata.

Most organizations have a records and information management (RIM) department with skilled professionals who know how to apply RIM principles to the information landscape. They accomplish this by inventorying where all of the organization's data exists, establishing a data map, and understanding the business processes that result in data. Big data can partner with RIM to reduce the costs of identifying, preparing, and analyzing data.

This is why organizations seeking to leverage big data tools to make better business decisions are advised to invite RIM professionals to the conversation.

RIM Reduces Costs, Adds Value

Experienced RIM professionals can help solve big data problems because they know how to organize data to meet RIM requirements, use a naturally consultative approach to helping business units understand how to manage information throughout its lifecycle, and know how to drive improvements--all things that will benefit the analytics team.

By creating synergies between RIM and the big data program staff and integrating RIM principles into all processes that "touch" data, organizations can forge and maintain a sustainable path to the information governance (IG) needed to ensure high-value data. This will reduce costs and add value to the big data program, by:

* Reducing data cleanup and preparation

* Reducing storage costs and...