Who owns data management? IT, legal disagree.

• Position: INFO GOVERNANCE - Information technology

Recent research conducted by Iron Mountain and the International Data Corp. (IDC) shows that IT and legal departments often disagree about who should oversee data management.

According to "Mining for Insight: Rediscovering the Data Archive," 45% of legal and compliance respondents said they believe they should be responsible for determining what to archive, but only 25% of IT respondents agreed. Additionally, only 38% of legal and compliance respondents said they view archives as enhancing revenue, compared to 70% of IT respondents.

John Sharpe, Iron Mountain's director of product management, data management, noted that the disparity likely stems from the fundamental difference in each group's goals for data management.

"Legal's need to access data drives cases, whereas IT often has more of a support function; it doesn't necessarily have the same urgency ... Legal has high expectations for IT to accomplish their data objectives, and that is a disconnect. They don't care about 1s and 0s; they care about emails and messages, the two are not necessarily aligned," he said.

According to the research, legal's data requirements are for specific content, while IT's focus is on storing and supporting all data. This misalignment creates misunderstandings between the two groups and impairs their ability to meet expectations.

Although storage costs continue to decrease, the associated costs of growing data volumes and the risks of potentially mismanaging these volumes mean legal and IT must be more strongly aligned. A good first step is for them to work together to define clear processes.

This could also help solve another problem the study identified: difficulty in accessing information. According to the research, 49% of respondents said...