On Friday, May 16 David Berlind had a post on one of the Information Week (that's right, Information Week!) blogs that highlights how much education needs to be done relative to what responsible information management and retention is all about.
Among his contentions was that "stodgy old AIIM" (see link here) was leading customers down the path to more and more software purchases for in-house email systems, and that the solution to the email management and retention issues facing organizations lies in "the cloud" -- i.e., saving everything through services like gmail and then being able to find anything through search.
I guess I can take some comfort in that at least he didn't characterize ME as "old and stodgy." Thank goodness he didn't talk with my kids.
His assumption that all would be well if we just saved everything in the cloud would strike terror into the hearts of most CIOs and legal counsels that I know.
There are many aspects of his post that are indeed compelling. As someone essentially running a small business (albeit one representing an industry), we are constantly looking for ways to move toward SaaS and open source and ASP solutions that will be more cost effective in managing our critical business processes. But seeking to save everything and then find it with search is simply missing the point of what retention and effective and responsible records and information management is all about.
Organizations should seek to retain emails (or any other form of electronic information for that matter) only to meet two criteria: 1) legal and regulatory requirements; and 2) to run and sustain the business.
Effective retention management and records management in an electronic era is about many things, but it is not about indefinitely saving each and every piece of electronic flotsam and jetsam created or sent, no matter how expensive or inexpensive it is to do so. It is about having systems that can intelligently differentiate between the email that says, "We will have birthday cake for everyone in the conference room at 3 p.m." and the one that says, "Yes I agree to ship 1,000 widgets at $25 each to you to arrive by Tuesday the 20th."
Retention management is just as much about what you get rid of and how you do so as it is about what you save. One has only to think about the incredible costs that so many of us pay for off-line paper records storage (with unknown discovery risk) because we failed to differentiate on the front end what was important to keep and what was not. (I am sure although cannot prove it that there are some badge lanyards in offsite storage from the 1993 AIIM Show!)
I cannot think of a single general counsel in our membership who would think it would be a good idea to indefinitely save each and every e-mail that everyone in the organization sent or received. This would be an e-discovery nightmare waiting to happen.
What do you think? Comment here, or go to David's original post (although the commenting capability seems to come and go a bit on his blog)....
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